Audio By Carbonatix
Sometimes a guy is better off when his wildest dreams don’t come true. After all, when real life intrudes on fantasy, it can be most disappointing. So the hero finds out in Last of the Red Hot Lovers, playing at the RiverTree Theatre through Saturday. Oddly enough, Neil Simon’s meditation on one man’s pursuit of and ultimate disillusionment with his fantasies feels true to life. Smart performances help, but there’s plenty of sardonic realism in the script as well.
What Simon is best at is the comedy of the ordinary man in the uncomfortable grip of daily life. Simon’s characters can’t be said to think much or feel deeply. But at least when they pity themselves, they look silly. The audience can identify with them and their banal frustrations and desires while still being allowed to see through them.
Barney Cashman is a nice guy. He’s been married a long time to the same woman and he loves her. He’s not so much bored with her as with himself. But bored he is. So he starts looking for a beautiful little romance–an afternoon of daring love that will last him the rest of his life. He sees his tawdry little dreams of passion as magnificent, and though he hasn’t the ability to examine himself or his motives, his motives are more romantic than puerile.
The first of three women he invites to his mother’s apartment (an unlikely rendezvous site he employs while the old lady is off volunteering) is a bitter, cynical woman looking for a little physical reprieve from the perdition of her hard life. Elaine does not want romance, and she does not want to hear about Barney’s midlife crises, so Barney’s bungling attempt to get to know her only ticks her off. Mary Chandler’s hard-as-nails performance as Elaine is so bleak, sarcastic and troubling that she casts a pall of loneliness and pathos over the first act. Good work.
The second act is dominated by Barney’s next attempt at romance. He enters his mother’s apartment with a little more confidence, this time wearing a sports jacket and carrying an ashtray and a variety of cigarettes. He wants to avoid the mistakes he made the first time he tried to commit adultery. Bobbie Michele, an aspiring actress/singer/dancer with more than one screw loose, arrives, stoned, spacey and convinced that her ex-boyfriend kidnapped her dog. It soon becomes clear that Barney will find no satisfaction in this relationship, either. Lorraine Juhas is all bounce and giggle as the brainless Bobbie, whose spirits are so high (thanks to the funny cigs she smokes) that her sudden crashes come like brass cymbals in a crazed concert. That Juhas avoids playing Bobbie as a cliche is a testament to her talent.
The last act finds Barney swaggering into the apartment confidently with champagne and stemware. His coat is jazzier, and he does a little tail-wagging as he pours the bubbly. He’s more absurd as a suave sophisticate than he was as a bumpkin, and the play gets funnier as Barney gets more aggressive.
This time the lady he invites in is a close friend of his wife’s. Jeannette arrives in dark glasses, a big hat to hide under and a trench coat. She can barely bring herself to put down her oversized purse. She tells Barney she was never attracted to him, but that since no one is gentle, decent and loving anymore, she might as well have revenge on her philandering husband. Kami Lichtenberg as Jeannette manages to layer her odd, despairing character with piercing wit and frustration. As a middle-class, middle-aged matron, she radiates an ache of fearful disillusionment.
But finally, it’s James T. Stokes’s show. He makes Barney a self-pitying, basically decent Everyman, and all his unattractive wiggles and impotent shots at communi-cation are poignant and repulsive at the same time. When Barney tries to prove to Jeannette that there are decent, gentle, loving people in the world, Stokes’s earnestness is first frightening and then moving.
Of course, this is only Neil Simon–and if Simon gets the common man right, he never really gets to the bottom of what ails him. Simon’s insights may be true, but they are not true enough.
Last of the Red Hot Lovers, through January 7 at the RiverTree Theatre, 1124 Santa Fe Drive, 825-8150.