Not a play, a therapy session

By Elizabeth Maupin
Sentinel Theater Critic

Published in The Orlando Sentinel, May 17, 1998

SANFORD -- Jake's Women is the play that Neil Simon's psychiatrist must have wanted him to write.

Whether it's the play his audiences wanted him to write is a different story.

Judging from the laughter I heard opening night at Orlando Theatre Project's co-production with the Fine Arts Theatre at Seminole Community College, I'm not sure that every theatergoer cares about the difference. Still, the combined forces of the project's professionals and SCC's students are not enough to find much humanity in this self-indulgent mess of a play.

Jake's Women, first produced in 1992, followed a decade's worth of autobiographical comic dramas that showed Simon at the top of his game. Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound surprised people with the comic master's new depth, and Lost in Yonkers (1991) won him a Pulitzer Prize.

But the string of shows that has followed has proved to be a major disappointment, both for audiences and for commercial-theater producers who are learning that Simon's work is no longer a sure thing.

That list of recent shows -- the musical version of The Goodbye Girl, Laughter on the 23rd Floor, off-Broadway's London Suite and this season's short-lived Proposals -- began with Jake's Women, an apparently autobiographical comic drama in which a successful middle-aged writer tries to cope with all the women in his life.

The catch is that most of those women -- his sister, his daughter, his therapist and his dead first wife -- exist for the theatergoer in Jake's head and that he summons them to his side to help him through a marital crisis with Maggie, his very present second wife.

Unfortunately, the character of Jake appears to us the way he must appear to his therapist -- glum, self-obsessed and eager to make jokes even when the time is not right.

Now, what makes a good play and what makes a good therapy session are apt to be different matters, and no one should know that better than Simon.

That didn't stop him from writing a piece in which most of the characters speak like case histories from self-help manuals and in which character itself goes flying out the window when there's a gag in store.

Maybe Orlando Theatre Project and its cohorts at SCC thought they could find some depth in this self-pitying mishmash; maybe they thought Simon's humor would overcome the show's weaknesses.

In any case, director Anne Hering and a relatively able cast seem to skate on the surface of this show, and they get little from it but laughs.

Indeed, there's pleasure in some of those laughs, particularly from the idiosyncratic Michelle Breaugh as Jake's voluble sister, Karen, and from Christine Decker as Edith, his wisecracking shrink. Kelly Wells can't make much of the idiotic role of Sheila, a date who exists only as a comic foil.

But two SCC students, Kim Crandall and Angela Jo Strohm, are pleasant as Jake's grown daughter, Molly, and his first wife, Julie. And sixth-grader Marissa Styne is appropriately endearing as Molly at 12.

As Maggie, Kelly Holden is a bright and appealing presence, who deserves neither the hackneyed dialogue Simon gives her (does anyone really speak of herself as ``moving up the corporate ladder''?) nor the tribulations Jake hands out.

Holden makes Maggie likable in spite of it all, but Al Krulick has a much higher hill to climb to do the same with Jake, who seems to be the repository of everything Simon's shrink has said to him in the past 25 years.

Krulick, who is onstage throughout, brings plenty of intelligence to the part, and he sidesteps the snide glibness that made Alan Alda unbearable in the role on Broadway. But this Jake seems so gloomy that it's hard to imagine any woman sticking around, and Krulick works so hard to make him funny -- adopting foreign accents when he mentions other countries, dancing himself around the stage -- that he's clearly performing all the time.

Paul Luby's small set, a New York apartment, works well enough, although it lacks the lushness you would expect for a character who is clearly well-to-do, and Jerry Klein's lighting distinguishes between what is real and what is illusory. But Janet Haliscak's costumes don't do the actors any favors, and other minor mishaps -- an accent here, a sound cue there -- mar the production from time to time.

Still, what hurts Jake's Women most is Jake's Women, a play that Simon should have left in a dresser drawer. If a character has trouble with intimacy or if he can't forgive his mother, maybe there's a play in showing why he's that way. If all the playwright is going to do is tell us, he ought to be paying us $100 an hour and we ought to get Augusts off.

'Jake's Women'

Theater company: Orlando Theatre Project/Seminole Community College Fine Arts Theatre.

Playwright: Neil Simon.

Cast: Michelle Breaugh, Kim Crandall, Christine Decker, Kelly Holden, Al Krulick, Angela Jo Strohm, Marissa Styne, Kelly Wells.

Director: Anne Hering.

Scenic designer: Paul Luby.

Lighting designer: Jerry Klein.

Costume designer: Janet Haliscak.

Theater: Fine Arts Theatre, Seminole Community College, 100 Weldon Blvd., Sanford.

Times: 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, through May 31.

Tickets: $13 and $15.

Reservations: (407) 328-2040.

[Posted 05/16/98 8:27 PM EST]