Love in Bloom

By T.E. Kalem

CHAPTER TWO by Neil Simon

In recent years, the preproduction interview with a Broadway playwright has taken the place of the Shavian preface. Unlike the Shavian preface, it is rarely witty and seldom illuminating. Customarily, it sounds like last-minute plea bargaining from a man who feels that his pressagent has been negligent in plugging the upcoming show.

Neil Simon has established a precedent in this area by saying that his new play is autobiographical, that it is, in effect, about the trauma he experienced at the death of his first wife and the rage over that loss, which he callously inflicted on his second wife even though she made him supremely happy.

To judge the man by the play, Neil Simon has to be decidedly schizophrenic --something that is highly improbable. Act I of Chapter Two contains the sunniest romantic sequences of the wooing of a woman by a man that Simon has ever written. Act II contains some husband-and-wife bloodletting that Edward Albee might have thought of when he was writing Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

For critical purposes, let's assume that the play, at Broadway's Imperial Theater, is not totally autobiographical. When we meet the hero, a writer named George Schneider (Judd Hirsch), he is a heartbroken shell of a man who sleepwalks around his living room poring over letters of condolence. The leftovers in his refrigerator are reinventing penicillin. His brother Leo (Cliff Gorman), a kind of compassionate Sammy Glick, feels that the cure for George's depression is to fix him up with a date--in Leo's mind a euphemism for an easy lay.

As far as George is concerned, these ventures are like trips on the Andrea Doria. Then a simple misunderstanding puts him in touch with the recently divorced Jennie Malone (Anita Gillette). The deftness, charm and earned intimacy of the pair's telephonic courtship would put Simon in a playwrights' hall of fame if one existed. George and Jennie meet, and love blooms at first sight, a sight for glad eyes since Gillette is an actress of such beguiling, womanly warmth that glaciers would melt at her approach.

Comes the gray dawn of Act II. Ugly spats. Tracer-bullet words. The queasy feeling of watching a friend's once happy marriage bleed to death in a well-manicured living room. The truly autobiographical Neil Simon cannot face that. In all of his plays, Simon has never looked at pain for more than a moment without the shield of a Hathaway eye patch. He uses the wisecrack as a poultice to ease the sight of life's open wounds.

In Chapter Two, the belated diversionary tactic is to have Brother Leo and Jennie's best friend Faye Medwick (Ann Wedgeworth) indulge in a teasy, vaudevillian, near adulterous liaison. Wedgeworth is a lispy, New Yorky clown with Valentine's Day on the brain, and her performance is as impeccable as her body is scannable. Not to scant the men. It will take the year or so that their contracts have to run to find adequate replacements for the richly gifted Hirsch and Gorman.

The play ends happily-- a pact Simon always keeps with his audience. When will he choose to keep the compact he seems to want to make with himself -- to plunge hip-deep-bold instead of toe-deep-scared into the consciousness stream of the real Neil Simon? -- T.E. Kalem

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