STAGE REVIEW : Classic Neil Simon Shines at Gaslamp

Timing, always a strong suit of Neil Simon’s, is gone over lovingly in “Broadway Bound,” the playwright’s ode to his own development as a comedy writer.

The grandfather of his alter ego, Eugene Jerome, has wonderful timing, which makes him funny despite his dislike of jokes, Eugene points out in one of his many asides to the audience. Even his mother, the enigmatic heart of the play, gets her apotheosis when she slips in a few funny turns of phrase during her story about the evening she danced with George Raft.

“She had a sense of humor,” Eugene says reverentially. That, from Eugene’s viewpoint, is clearly the highest compliment one can pay anyone.

How fortunate that the timing of the show at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre’s Hahn Cosmopolitan is also wonderful--not just because it kicks off the Gaslamp’s 10th season in high style, but because it will overlap with the premiere of Simon’s latest, “Jake’s Women,” at the Old Globe Theatre on March 8.

If “Jake’s Women,” which deals with a writer and the women in his life (dead wife, ex-wife, mother, daughter, therapist) proves to be as semi-autobiographical as the “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” “Biloxi Blues,” “Broadway Bound” trilogy, theatergoers might want to plan on seeing both plays as a two-parter.

Simon’s “Rumors,” which premiered at the Old Globe in 1988, comes chronologically in between, but thematically it was an exercise in farce, a sabbatical from seriousness, an inky door that allowed the playwright to escape from himself through rapid-fire jokes.

The great escape in “Broadway Bound,” Simon’s finest until now, is a Broadway future and Eugene’s conviction--so poignantly a young man’s conviction--that he will never make the same mistakes as his parents. “Jake’s Women” is likely to deal with whether this 23-year-old really knew what he was talking about.

In “Broadway Bound,” as in life, there are also a number of smaller escapes, each of which allows the actors a telling moment of metamorphosis.

Eugene’s brother, Stanley, played by a scene-stealing David Ellenstein as the ultimate hothead, escapes from a sales job in boys clothing to a life of easy money and easy women by setting a fire under Eugene’s talent and making it work for both of them.

And a fire is just what James Saba needs as Eugene. Saba has timing and talent to spare, but he conveys the desire to write comedy without convincing us of his need to write comedy. That desperate conviction that humor is the only knife he has that can cut his way out of his coffin is the edge that is missing from an otherwise likable performance.

The rest of the ensemble, under the firm, unsentimental direction of guest director Larry Arrick, provides a consistent, tensile strength that makes the jokes--coming as they do amid the tears--bounce very high indeed.

Eugene’s father, achingly played by Tavis Ross, escapes from a life of quiet desperation by running into the arms of another woman.

Howard London is the genuine, endearingly crotchety article as Eugene’s grandfather, who escapes from his wife and her upscale Miami migration through his dedication to Trotsky’s socialist principles.

Eugene’s Aunt Blanche, a small part sensitively if lightly sketched by Allison Brennan, escapes from Brighton Beach poverty--and acceptance--through marriage to a rich man.

Only Eugene’s mother, Kate, doesn’t escape. She stays at home, abandoned in turn by husband, sons and father, polishing so religiously the table her grandfather carved for her grandmother that you imagine that she can see the faces of the departed in its lustrous gleam.

It is that picture of her, frozen in time, that makes this play Simon’s Jewish “I Remember Mama.” But the play is not mere sentimental canonization. The suppleness of Simon’s writing here leaves for ambiguities in the interpretation of Kate’s character. April Shawhan plays on Kate’s taut control and self-restraint, but she also captures her brittle fragility, a whiff of steel magnolias curling around the tempered Brooklyn steel. Linda Lavin, as seen in an excerpt of the play in a Tony awards broadcast (she won Best Actress for this role), was tough as they come--no sugar on that pill.

There is room for both Kates because, like the family the Jerome brothers write about in their first radio sketch, Kate may have been modeled on one very particular woman (Simon’s mother, as the playwright has said in previous interviews), but the character’s range is great enough to be stretched to portray so many others.

To the Gaslamp’s credit, professionalism gleams from this production as surely as the sheen from the table. The company started off right by hiring Arrick. Guest directors, a relatively new move by the Gaslamp, can usher in fresh ideas as Arrick does here. And the technical support is as solid as always, from the handsome two-story set by Nick Reid--realistic, lower class--the muted hues of Jeanne Reith’s costume design and the urban sound design by Michael Shapiro.

“Broadway Bound” whets the appetite for the next Simon, now in pre-production a few scant miles away and it augurs well for the new Gaslamp season. Just what the good “Doc” (as Simon has been nicknamed for his script-doctoring skills) might have ordered.