Comic Tearjerker

By T.E. Kalem

If the entire world turned into a bleak desert of melancholy, Neil Simon would be an oasis of laughter. His eye for the wryly amusing incongruities of life, his zingy one-line gag-ripostes, his ardently skilled desire to be entertaining--all these have made him the leading U.S. comic playwright for more than a decade. But like the clown with the yen to play Hamlet, Simon has had the urge, and been critically urged, to try his hand at more serious drama. The result is The Gingerbread Lady, a schizoid play in which the dramatist is so busy applying plasters of wit to woefully bruised psyches that the evening is doubly robbed, both of honest hurt and buoyant humor.

The play focuses on a famed ex-songstress named Evy (Maureen Stapleton), who has succumbed to the demons of alcoholism and nymphomania. She has just come home from a drying-out session at a sanatorium. Will she or will she not hit the bottle and the bed again? This is the basic situation, and it is weak, in that the audience knows that she will, or there would be no play. Evy's two closest friends want to be loyal watchdogs, but their own shaky personalities make them abettors of despair. One is a middle-aged homosexual actor (Michael Lombard) who knows he will never make the grade in the theater. The other is a self-pampering narcissist (Betsy von Furstenberg), whose mentality is simply a cosmetic extension of her face. With inexplicable love and concern, Evy's teen-age daughter (Ayn Ruymen) by a husband long since divorced from Evy, filters a ray of redemptive hope for her mother through the final curtain.

If this sounds like daytime TV soap opera, the play is perilously close to it--an unsettling kind of comic tearjerker. The various relationships are scarcely credible. It is impossible to believe that anyone as self-centered as the Von Furstenberg character could have nursed Evy through drinking bout after drinking bout, as she claims to have done. Maureen Stapleton gives a high-strung, neurotically personal performance, but we can never relate the woman onstage with the poster on the wall that says she once sang in Carnegie Hall. The Evy before us might be a suburban housewife in a severe funk. Stapleton's hysteria is totally convincing, though she speaks in a peculiarly strident and monotonous voice. The unfailingly attractive Betsy von Furstenberg seems to be reciting her lines rather than delivering them. Lombard is most felicitously cast as the homosexual actor and is uncannily reminiscent of James Coco in Last of the Red Hot Lovers.

Different Ending. Probably Simon is too normal (if the word does not sound pejorative) to intuit the inner nature of the characters he has put onstage. He is too self-disciplined, too efficient, too morally responsible, ever to be able to understand an Evy except from the outside. Laughter is a form of incessant motion in Simon's work. It is a self-protective device by which his characters dodge the bullets of real pain. Simon uses a joke both to ward off hurt and to assuage it. In a play like The Gingerbread Lady, this use of laughter vitiates any deep emotion the moment after it is aroused.

While this is one way of enduring sorrow, it is also a way of concealing the self from the self. Before Simon rewrote part of The Gingerbread Lady on the road tour (mostly the third act), it had a different ending. In that former final scene, the lights are low. Evy is boozed out of her mind, and the record player is spinning one of her old romantic hits. She has just invited a Puerto Rican grocery boy to sit down in her living room, and we know she is going to go to bed with him. It was an unutterably sad scene, and it had the poignant reality of something out of Tennessee Williams. Clearly, there was a truth in that sadness that Neil Simon could not, and may never, bring himself to face.

T.E. Kalem

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.