![](http://www.syracusenewtimes.com/newyork/file-172-.jpg")
At first glance the announcement looked like a mistake. What could be motivating Garrett Heater and Susan Blumer’s Covey Theatre Company to revive Neil Simon’s nearly half-century-old domestic comedy Barefoot in the Park, now at the Mulroy Civic Center’s BeVard Community Room? In less than three years the Covey has established a reputation for edgy and very contemporary fare, of which July’s nearly X-rated musical Avenue Q is an apt example. Barefoot might indeed be a crowd-pleaser, with 1,530 performances in its first run and many revivals locally, but Covey has been doing robust box office all along.
Reflecting Simon’s roots in television, Barefoot feels sitcomish, all surface with very little subtext. Polishing that surface, however, is really what this production is about. A still young Mike Nichols, breaking away from sketch comedy with Elaine May, built his reputation as a director with Barefoot, and Heater (coincidentally the same age that Nichols was then) is parading his abilities here.
Any director who revives a familiar property, whether Hamlet, Peter Pan or The Sound of Music, is leading with his chin. He not only has to be good, he has to exceed expectations. This is all the more true with early Neil Simon, where the jokes are often perceived to be threadbare and stale. What Heater accomplishes here is to get us to laugh as if we had never heard any of them before. And we do laugh, deeply and consistently all the way through.
Heater’s first smart move was to leave in all the then-current trivia that makes us feel Manhattan newlyweds Corie (Sara Weiler) and Paul Bratter (J. Allan Orton) are living in a distant never-neverland during the Kennedy administration, where no conflict is intractable and happiness is there for the reaching. Coffee is brewed in a percolator, suburban matrons buy Toni Home Permanents, dial telephones come with long cords, luggage comes with hard sides, and $125 a month is a lot to pay for a 48th Street apartment, even if it is a fifth-floor walk-up. And hip young professional Paul is taken aback at the irregularity of other tenants in his building: One couple is (gasp!) of the same gender, only he’s not sure which it is.
“5D” is the address on the door, but we can never forget what exertion it takes to climb that high. The device is in danger of getting weary, but to refresh it Heater casts veteran player Bernie Kaplan, now in his 80s, as a uniformed delivery man, whose entrance looks as though it might be his last. Fifth-floor walk-up also means that the apartment is spartan, but, thanks to scenic designer Maggie Blythewood, the doors slam.
As there is only one set, the apartment is Corie’s turf. She speaks almost half the dialogue in the nearly 2½-hour action. Although apparently well-educated and upper-middle class (Paul’s a lawyer), Corie has no thoughts of working outside the apartment, but she does decorate and humanize the place. With the honeymoon barely past, she still craves romance and resents Paul’s spending an evening preparing for a morning in the courtroom. She wants his full attention when he is home and will put on a skimpy, revealing black negligee to warm him up.
Two somewhat older people complicate Corie and Paul’s lives. One is Corie’s fur coat-wearing mother Ethel Banks (Karis Wiggins), from the far New Jersey suburbs. Anything but a cliché, she does not interfere or second-guess and seems to approve of Paul. But as a widow she has an empty house at home and tends to hang around a lot.
Residing in an even tinier apartment above Corie and Paul is the highly ambiguous Victor Velasco (Ed Mastin), “the Bluebeard of 48th Street,” of undetermined accent and no visible means of support. Behind in his rent, he must climb to his digs via a ladder in Corie and Paul’s bedroom, and he’s given to patently bogus claims, like belonging to a gourmet club that also includes Prince Philip and Daryl Zanuck.
So what makes this funny? Sometimes, as his detractors charge, Simon is merely having his characters exchange gags as if they were vaudevillians or burlesque comics:
Paul: Guess who lives in Apartment D?
Corie: I don’t know.
Paul: Nobody else does either. (Pause) Nobody’s been seen there in three years, (pause) except every morning there are nine empty tuna cans outside the door.
Corie: Who do you suppose lives there?
Paul: (five-beat pause) Sounds like a big cat with a can opener.
OK, a superior vaudevillian, but such setups account for only a small portion of Barefoot’s laughter generation. Instead, these are preparation for Simon’s capacity for sprinkling humor all though the dialogue about things that are not in themselves funny, passages that look like nothing on the page or when recorded in a reviewer’s notebook. Ethel suffers from a bad back, for example, and so director Heater and actresses Wiggins and Weiler contrive to get the maximum mileage out of such an unpromising device as her bed board.
There is a kind of plot between the principals and also the second leads, as well as a surprising expression of deep-felt emotion. The scene-stealing moment in this production belongs to Karis Wiggins, during the morning after her Ethel allows Victor to drive her home from the indigestible evening at the Albanian restaurant. It turns out the two never went to New Jersey and, well, here she is, hair disheveled and not wearing her dress in this G-rated comedy. Her great speech of needfulness is all the more affecting for being couched in absurdity.
This is a springboard, also, for Orton’s big scene, His Paul proves that, with enough alcohol, he will unstuff his shirt, burst his buttons and throw away his marbles.
With her name on the program above other credits, it is Sara Weiler who has to keep firing zingers for the full 2½ hours. She’s both needful and resilient, a pre-Steinem housewife and a spunky free spirit. Even at rest, her adorable quotient is 10.
As the only character who is comic from the get-go, Ed Mastin’s Velasco gets no heartfelt speech. But he pulls off the slyest trick in the show. Just as this is a role that would have called for the much-beloved Bill Molesky before he decamped for Florida a year ago, Mastin’s roll of the eyes under his dark brows and his throaty cadence when beginning a line brings Molesky back to us. He’s doing a Molesky to get Velasco. You read it here first, folks.
Performers and aestheticians have long been at a loss to explain what makes a line funny, just shrugging off that it’s “all in the timing.” Unfailing timing is what you get all through Covey’s Barefoot in the Park.
This production runs through Saturday, Sept. 22. See Times Table for information.
