CAPSULE REVIEW : Simon’s ‘Rumors’: Groping for Truth

Neil Simon’s “Rumors,” at the Doolittle Theatre, is a symphony of squirming.

Its characters spend most of the evening wiggling this way, groping that way, improvising tall tales, doing whatever it takes to cover up what happened to their good friend Charlie.

Not that they really know what happened to Charlie. Their behavior is based on rumors and assumptions; Charlie himself is too sedated to be coherent. This, and the fact that these are supposedly sophisticated and powerful people, make their frantic prevarications all the funnier. And all the less likely.

In an interview in the program, Simon spoke of the importance of establishing how much trouble everyone is in from the very first line. He certainly has the right actress, Kandis Chappell, to open his play at the Doolittle. With her skinny limbs sticking out of her bubble dress, her trembling countenance and her lunges for her forbidden cigarettes, Chappell is reminiscent of a particularly anxious hen. She’s hilarious.

Chappell’s Chris and her husband, Ken (Gibby Brand), have arrived at the 10th anniversary dinner party of their friends Charlie and Myra, only to find Myra and the household help missing, the dinner uncooked, and Charlie upstairs with a superficial gunshot wound in his ear lobe. The other guests are about to arrive.

Chris and Ken--who are both attorneys--assume Charlie tried to kill himself. They regard this as a criminal offense that must be hushed up--to protect themselves as well as Charlie, who is a deputy mayor of New York.

If you have no trouble believing they would react this way, you’ll sail into the second part of the play with no sweat. It’s the characters who sweat--the guests start bumping into each other’s accounts of what happened. The spectacle of all this deception obscures the shakiness of the initial premise, at least for a while.

Ron Leibman leads the parade of the put-upon guests and delivers one of his patented super-manic performances. Jessica Walter plays his wife with an exasperated, socially upward New York accent and a flair for the catty remark.

We never learn the truth of most of the rumors mentioned in the script, especially those of the who’s-sleeping-where variety. While too much truth-telling would drag down most farces, this one could use a greater sense that some of these stories might be true. All that squirming would seem more purposeful, more pungent.

A complete review runs in Friday’s Calendar section.