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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for July 27, 2012

TT: Laughter in the dark

July 27, 2012 by Terry Teachout

My drama column returns to The Wall Street Journal today after a two-week hiatus. I flew out to Minneapolis on Wednesday to see the Guthrie Theater’s revival of Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Do Neil Simon’s plays have a future? Nobody was asking that heretical question a quarter-century ago, back when the author of “The Odd Couple” was still the most popular and successful playwright on Broadway. But American comedy has mutated almost beyond recognition in the ensuing years, and it’s been so long since Mr. Simon’s glory days that you can’t help but wonder whether his quaint one-two-here-comes-the-wisecrack style is destined to vanish into the same memory hole that long ago swallowed up the likes of Bob Hope and Red Skelton.
Sunshineboys1.jpgI recently saw an Off-Broadway production of “Lost in Yonkers” that was so persuasively staged and acted as to make me wonder for the first time whether Mr. Simon’s best plays might possibly be ripe for revival. I felt the much same way after flying out to Minneapolis on Wednesday to catch the Guthrie Theater’s more conventional but genuinely satisfying new production of “The Sunshine Boys,” Mr. Simon’s 1972 play about a comedy team whose long partnership has dissolved in acrimony and spite….
The premise of “The Sunshine Boys” is neatly pointed: Willie Clark (Peter Michael Goetz) and Al Lewis (Raye Birk) worked together for 43 years, at the end of which Al decided that he’d had enough of show business. His abrupt retirement enraged Willie, who wasn’t ready to quit the stage and now regards his old partner with a volatile blend of pride and rancor: “As an actor, no one could touch him…as a human being, no one wanted to touch him.” The two men haven’t spoken for a decade as “The Sunshine Boys” gets underway, and Willie affects to be perfectly happy to leave it that way. Enter Ben (Robert O. Berdahl), his nephew and manager, who hopes to reunite Lewis and Clark for a TV special. Al is game, but Willie isn’t–at least not at first.
As always, Mr. Simon plays for laughs and gets them, especially in the riotous scene in which Lewis and Clark re-enact their knockabout vaudeville act for the TV cameras. But he is also alert to the underlying pathos of the situation, for the septuagenarian Willie, who lives alone in a crumbling residential hotel, is all too clearly in the early stages of dementia (though nobody would have thought to call it that in 1972). Desperate to cling to his independence, he refuses to come to terms with the diminished thing that is his life….
Gisselman, who directed the Guthrie’s 2006 revival of “Lost in Yonkers,” has staged “The Sunshine Boys” in the same straightforward vein. While it’s not especially daring, nobody makes the mistake of hitting the jokes too hard, and there are more than a few moments when pain peers through the laughter….
Mr. Goetz, who reminds me of Art Carney in his irascible old age, has the lion’s share of the best lines and delivers them with growling gusto. Would, though, that Mr. Gisselman had encouraged him to be more brutal…
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

TT: Almanac

July 27, 2012 by Terry Teachout

A man of pleasure is a man of pains.
Edward Young, Night Thoughts

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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