This last Sunday, I attended the Cahaba Theatre Group’s staged reading of Neil Simon’s Jake’s Women. As there was only one performance, it makes little sense to review it in full, but it was an interesting afternoon at the theatre albeit in a decidedly nontheatrical venue. The reading was held at the Clubhouse on Highland, an early 20th century Arts & Crafts style home that is now used for charitable events, weddings, and other cultural activities.
It was a beautiful afternoon in this Fall that looks like Fall, but most decidedly does not feel like one as we have had record-breaking highs in Birmingham, Alabama. The venue itself was gorgeous, but like all spaces not intended for theatre, it has its issues. With the seating all one level, audience members bobbed their heads back and forth and up and down to witness certain moments of the piece, itself performed under much too dim lighting (especially on the day Daylight Savings Time ended). The “stage” was nothing more than chairs, stools, and lit music stands that the performers could step up to during certain moments of action. In a way, it was the perfect setup for Neil Simon’s play—a look at the life of a writer with a very vivid imagination.
The late Neil Simon came of age with a group of young writers who all got their big breaks writing for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows. That writers’ room included Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart (TV’s M*A*S*H), Woody Allen, Carl Reiner, and the (then) team of Danny and Neil Simon. Can you imagine such a room as this? Well, you can—because Simon immortalized it himself in the play Laughter on the 23rd Floor, which inspired a television film starring Nathan Lane. The Simon brothers then turned to Broadway with the play Come Blow Your Horn, but Danny was persuaded by other interests and the sole credit went to Neil, who had hist first modest hit. That was the beginning of one of the most successful playwriting careers in theatre history.
Simon’s prolific work can be divided into three periods: his early raucous comedies (Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, Plaza Suite, and The Sunshine Boys), his maturation period that dealt with heavier issues through comedy (Chapter Two and the “Brighton Beach” trilogy—Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and Broadway Bound), and a late period which featured his highest highs (the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lost in Yonkers) and his lowest lows (never reaching Broadway with his last dramedy, Rose’s Dilemma).
Of his later works, my favorite (hands down) is Jake’s Women, though it took Simon longer than almost all his plays to get right. First workshopped at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego in 1990 starring Peter Coyote, it finally reached sold out Broadway houses in 1992 with Alan Alda at the helm. Essentially, Jake’s Women is autobiographical in the sense that it delves into Simon’s creative life as a writer and his inability to devote himself to his craft and to the spouse du jour. Married five times, Simon’s wives often would be disappointed when he was clearly thinking about work while they wanted attention. Simon was acutely aware of this, and Jake’s Women is a reckoning with himself.
In the play, the writer Jake conjures imaginary versions of the various women in his life to help him through his emotional problems, chiefly his floundering marriage with Maggie (Valerie Brock). The single male onstage, Jake has imagined conversations with his sister, therapist, his daughter at two different ages, a girlfriend (after he is separated from Maggie), and his first wife, who we find out died very young. This is, perhaps, the most autobiographical element as Simon’s first wife Joan Baim tragically died of cancer in her early forties. Her free spirit was the inspiration for Barefoot in the Park and, reading his two volumes of memoirs, it seems clear to me that Simon never got over her.
Jake’s Women is a different Simon play. Most of them, while they have the laugh-a-minute one liners for which he was famous, are grounded in naturalism. This is Simon attempting a kind of magical realism with the long-form imaginary conversations. Essentially, except for the few “actual” scenes, Jake is really talking to himself the entire play—his “women” are versions inside his head, and we have no idea how much they reflect their own “realities.”
Alan Alda was the perfect Jake. Thankfully, we have a 1996 television film that captures his performance. Jake is Jewish, neurotic, and articulate. While Alda was Italian and not Jewish, he blossomed in neurotic film roles—such as his performance in one of Woody Allen’s masterpieces, Crimes and Misdemeanors. In the film version, his conjurings could actually disappear while onstage, they simply enter and exit, or the transitions are done with lighting. Having a grounded, believable Jake (and an appropriately longsuffering Maggie) is the key to a soaring Jake’s Women.
Cahaba Theatre Group did not have that. Judd McCluney as Jake and Brock as Maggie served as almost fatal flaws for this incarnation. This Jake was whiny, unsympathetic, and clearly had not spent enough time with the text as all the rhythms of Simon’s humor were lost in stumble after stumble. While I understand it was a reading and the scripts were present onstage, you can’t place the blame there. There is a way to do a reading, concert or staged, where the lines can lift and soar. But it takes a deep knowledge of the text because, even with its prerequisite broad humor, the dialogue does not have the same rhythms of The Odd Couple or The Sunshine Boys, which are hard to mess up by any standard. While the actress playing Maggie was supposed to be Midwestern and out of place in New York, her accent (perhaps the actress’ own) was decidedly New York and her facial expressions almost nonexistent. There was virtually no way to connect with the leads on any level.
The price of admission did have a payoff, however. The other group of “Jake’s women” were more than game to take up the slack. I must especially point out Luciana Jeffers as Edith, Jake’s therapist. Nailing every line, making the part her own, she was the reason to see the show. Also, the young actresses playing Jake’s daughter (Marlena Elliot and Summer Guffey) showed real, promising talent. This should not be a surprise as Martha S. Summey, the director, was a noted theatre teacher of adolescents for many years.
But, aside from the leads (and the length given McCluney’s off-rhythms), the real offense to me as an audience member was the silver-haired man who asked to sit next to us on our row. It was as if he had bathed in pure garlic then brushed his teeth with the stuff for good measure. The olfactory senses are the most acute and it was difficult to concentrate on Jake’s Women when way too often, a fresh wave of garlic breath wafted over me, making me sick to my stomach.
I guess one learned two things: if you’re going to do Neil Simon, your lead must understand and know the play and if you go out in public, nix the garlic in your meal. Your fellow theatregoers will thank you.
Unfortunately, Simon lived to see his style of comedy die out. He was never much taken seriously in his heyday (even with Tony Awards to his credit). He was mostly seen as a hit-making machine who only burrowed under the surface. But many of his plays defy that description: The Prisoner of Second Avenue, Proposals, and even one of the flops, 45 Seconds from Broadway, showed a writer of immense talent who might not have been able to shake his Borscht Belt beginnings but plunged into darker territory than you might think. Even that old warhorse The Odd Couple begins with a suicidal man and Chapter Two may go down as Simon’s most penetrative play on divorce and starting over at a certain age.
Overall, it was his popularity that was his downfall. “Serious” dramatists are not meant to be popular with mass audiences in much the same way comedies have a hard time being taken seriously in Hollywood for the Best Picture Oscar. This is an elitist and criminal, but a fact of reality in showbusiness. Nevertheless, Jake’s Women is a very funny and ultimately moving play about action over thought, of living life instead of dreaming it up, of reckoning with our faults and being brave enough to overcome them. Damn fine playwright, Neil Simon—and a master craftsman. And, as a man of the theatre, I’m sure he never bathed in garlic before attending his own premieres.
Jake’s Women
by Neil Simon
Directed by Martha S. Summey
The Cahaba Theatre Group, Inc.
The Clubhouse on Highland
