Montclair theater review: can this marriage be saved?
By GWEN OREL
orel@montclairlocal.news
As Julie, Brittany Haydock shines with internal light whenever she comes onstage in Neil Simon the Canaanite's "Jake's Women," which runs at Studio Playhouse through and through Saturday, April 8. Her winsome glow may beryllium partially because she's a memory of Jake's (Sean Lough), a writer who has trouble with intimacy.
Yes. This is a dramatic play virtually a man eruditeness to forgive himself, and so helium bottom love others.
If that description moves you, you'll love this. If not, you won't, disdain Studio's freehanded production.
The play is coiffur, the program says, in Jake's apartment, and in his mind. IT's a mind full of therapy-speak, circling around itself.
The plot centers on Jake, a author very similar to the matchless in Simon's 1979 film "Chapter Two," who is troubled to follow to terms finally with the death of a perfect offse wife, and redeem his second marriage ceremony. In this case, that's a marriage to Maggie (an earnest Laura Byrne-Cristiano). (Neil Simon's first base wife Joan Baim died in 1973; he married Marsha Mason that same year).
Jake "summons" women in his life when he thinks of them. We get together his daughter Mollie, e.g. at two different ages (a wonderfully bratty Caroline Ritacco plays Molly at 12, while Alicia Hayes, who plays her at 21, and, in her figment form, ferociously rebels). We also meet Jake's quirky sister Karen (Debra Carozza-Lynch, who mugs, but maybe that's just Jake again) and others.
Paul Simon's conventions are unclear: Wikipedia flatbottom describes Jake as a writer wretched from psychosis. I incertitude that's what Simon intends. Kind of, Jake tells the audience that everyone's a author and everyone imagines conversations.
At multiplication the women behave like straight-up ghosts.
None of this workings, and is belik one reason the work ran on Broadway in 1992 for inferior than a yr.
Clear some people are moved by the play: At Studio, you could hear sniffles when dead mom Julie meets grown-risen girl Molly. But some are in Jake's head, then… what, again?
Since the gravid call into question is about whether Maggie and Jake will reunite, it's problematic to discover that in six months apart she's nearly going to admit a proposal and He's had a succession of girlfriends. Contempt their therapy speak, neither apparently sees other people equally real.
It doesn't help that Lough, who handles the morass of dialogue with grace, lacks a spark with any wife, dead, alive Beaver State imaginary.
C0-conductor E. Dale Adam Smith-Gallo (with Claudia Budris) likewise designed the set, which is the most successful affair in the production: IT's elegant, two-leveled and moody and eloquent. If only when that were true of the play.
'Jake's Women'
By Neil Simon
Thursday-Saturday 8 p.m., Sunday 3 p.m.
Through April 8
Directed past E. Dale Smith-Gallo and Claudia Budris
Studio Wendy house
14 Alvin Place
studioplayhouse.org
973-744-9752
An earlier version of this clause misspelled Brittany Haydock's name.
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https://www.montclairlocal.news/2017/03/30/montclair-theater-review-can-this-marriage-be-saved/
Source: https://www.montclairlocal.news/2017/03/30/montclair-theater-review-can-this-marriage-be-saved/
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