Word: acted
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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Simon's Edna is not a well-developed character; she often serves as a sounding board for Mel. Nevertheless, McPhee maintains a reasoned voice. Not surprisingly, when Edna finds a job after Mel has lost his, she also assumes his original neurotic qualities. Act Two's opening marvelously reveals this switch as Simon contrasts Mel's aimless wandering with Edna's verbal rambling. They also tend to philosophize; in the course of the play they wonder anxiously about their existence. To Edna's assertion that you either live with life's problems or get out, Mel replies that human beings...
Worse, Weiner's direction is often bland and static. He sidesteps many potential moments of comedic action. This is nowhere more apparent than in the family scene of Act Two; there is virtually no movement. Visiting Mel's apartment for the first time in nine years, his overbearing sisters do not even give it a cursory examination...
There are also major problems with the tone of this scene. After a finely controlled, realistic first act, Weiner miscalculates and guides the supporting actors into buffoonish caricatures. The actresses attempting Mel's sisters show no subtlety and more annoying, don't seem to believe in their characters as real people. Even their costumes are cartoonish and inappropriate. As Mel's constrained brother Harry, Jamie Orenstein aims at a fuller characterization, but remains rather wooden...
WEINER INSISTS on adding music at the end of each act, merely cheapening the moments instead of enhancing them. Simon's comedy is often more effective when it is subtle. Neither does the production get any help from Paul Eldrenkamp's set. More reminiscent of Arthur Miller's Brooklyn than of a Bloomie's-decorated Upper East Side apartment, it demands more money or more imagination...
Simon's study of Mel's boredom bogs down by the second act, and Mel and Edna's quarreling begins to grate. Likewise, Simon is out of his league when he attempts to portray a nervous breakdown; as a result Achtman is forced to rely on a farcical style when Mel snaps. But if, in the end, he and McPhee don't possess the passion to enflame the big emotional speeches in some scenes, they make us care about Mel's and Edna's ups and downs, triumphs and hardships. And that's no small feat...