‘ODD COUPLE’ CAN’T QUITE COME TO TERMS WITH LIFE

Between the late, late show, videocassettes and television re-runs, Neil Simon’s “The Odd Couple” carts around a lot of ghosts. Brea Theatre League’s current revival wrestles unsuccessfully with those Ghosts of Productions Past, never quite coming to life on its own terms.

Which is not to say that this “Odd Couple” isn’t entertaining; it’s still fun to watch slovenly sportswriter Oscar Madison trying to adjust to life with fastidious hypochondriac Felix Unger. But there is also a delicate interplay in Simon’s script as the two men sift through the ashes of their failed marriages, facing unsettling encounters with loneliness and shaky self-esteem. Director Michael A. Kane’s cast focuses on the broad, comic, often synthetic situations that Simon has created rather than on the very human comedy underneath. And although actors Dan Aulwurm and James Matthis provide the comic sparks and the funny visual bits that set off the now-predictable fireworks, much of the humanity in Simon’s play falls somewhere between the cracks.

Matthis makes the most of Felix’s fetishes, employing a hyperactive intensity that gets good mileage out of his gift for physical comedy. (His martyr act is pretty convincing, too, as he reduces his dates to tears with tales of his marriage.) Aulwurm plays the character of Oscar in varying degrees of annoyed exasperation. But it takes a real stretch of the imagination to envision these two men as friends, much less as roommates. The appearance of the Pidgeon sisters, two lovelies who live upstairs from the new bachelors, injects energy into the story with the capable performances of Diane Dale as the sympathetic Cecily and Lucinda Katherine as the engaging Gwendolyn.

Director Kane keeps the pace brisk, but a 20-minute intermission (necessitated by a scene change) arrives after only a 30-minute first act, halting the comic flow just as the momentum gets rolling. Additionally, the set, costume and prop details never provide a definitive fix on the time or place.

“The Odd Couple” will play through Saturday at Curtis Theatre, Brea Civic Cultural Center, 1 Civic Center Circle, Brea. For information, call (714) 528-4240.