Simon in the Sun

By T.E.K.

CALIFORNIA SUITE

by NEIL SIMON

If Broadway ever erects a monument to a patron saint of laughter, Neil Simon will have to be it. He is back in good form in California Suite, a quartet of playlets in the same mold as his Plaza Suite except that the setting is now the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Each of the playlets is a slightly shell-shocked encounter between visitors from outside city-states (New York, Philadelphia, London, Chicago) and Los Angeles, capital of the palm fringe of Western civilization. In playlet No. 1, two divorced ex-writers get together to discuss dividing the spoils: their 17-year-old daughter. Hannah (Tammy Grimes) has the true verbal grit of New York City and is a senior editor at Newsweek. William (George Grizzard) basks in Cal ifornia as a contented Polo Lounge liz ard. They both shoot from the quip. Al though William is defensive, he has the punchiest line: "New York is not Mecca -- it just smells like it."

Playlet No. 2, the most hilarious of the four, is one of those flirtations with sin and the fear of its consequences which has given Simon a particular hold on the fantasies of his prevailingly middleclass, middle-aged audiences. Mar vin (Jack Weston) has come West to celebrate the bar mitzvah of his nephew and been given the surprise present of a blonde hooker (Leslie Easterbrook). After a night of amnesiac pleasure, Mar vin wakes to find this houri, a vodka overachiever, comatose in his bed.

Marvin's wife Millie (Barbara Barrie) is on her way up to the suite. What follows is a kind of Feydeau farce with one bedroom door. The scene has been directed with dazzling adroitness by Gene Saks, and Jack Weston's portray al of a human pachyderm in direst panic would bring tears of joy to the eyes of Zero Mostel.

The remaining two sketches are made of slimmer stuff, but the cast is so good that it gives away Simon's secret: how people guard themselves against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune with a jest.

T.E.K.

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