In the Quiet Woods, a Disquiet Family

You know “Proposals” is a Neil Simon play by listening to the audience; the laughs come as evenly and continually as waves. The actors must feel like they’re on a beach. Autumnal in mood, leisurely in pace, “Proposals” opened Wednesday night at the Ahmanson Theatre and is like no other Neil Simon play in particular but is unmistakably a play by Neil Simon.

The playwright’s stamp is not only in the waves. His main characters are witty and cutting and impossibly wise, even when they’re being foolish. At the core of the play is a softness, as comforting as it is unexciting. There is one hard, thorny scene between a mother and a daughter, which keeps threatening to occur and then finally does when the mother says something like, “It’s time to have that talk.” While the nine characters pair, re-pair and confront, you can always guess how things will be resolved. But if “Proposals” does not offer surprises in its nearly three hours, it does offer the pleasure of burnished, old-fashioned crafting, both in its structure and in its jokes.

The play occurs during a fateful summer, circa 1957, at a country house in the Pocono Mountains. The house, charmingly designed by John Lee Beatty, pivots to reveal a verdant woods behind. It belongs to Burt Hines (Ron Rifkin), a man gingerly recovering from a heart attack. Visiting him are his ex-wife, his adoring daughter, the three men she attracts, a model who comes with one of the men, and a housekeeper so loyal she waits in the bushes for an hour to catch the ailing Burt sneaking a cigarette. The housekeeper’s husband, absent for seven years, also shows up on one busy day. (“Is this some national holiday?” wonders the ex-wife).

Burt is a kind and doting father. He keeps up with his daughter’s personal life by eavesdropping through the window. Other than that he has very few traits; he is so gently written that in the end he almost evaporates from the stage, and there really is very little for Rifkin to do. Further, the Burt we see bears no relation to his back story--particularly when we learn that his still-beloved ex-wife Annie (Kelly Bishop) left him because he was so driven. The owner of a chain of retail TV stores, Burt kept opening one store after another, leaving his daughter Josie (Suzanne Cryer) to eat her dinner with the faithful housekeeper Clemma (L. Scott Caldwell). Annie hated being neglected but waited until Josie was in college to leave. The conflict between Annie and Burt seems whitewashed. We get no sense of any real animus between them, especially since the now remarried Annie is hanging around the whole summer. Also, if Burt was such an absent father, why is Josie only angry at her mother?

The younger generation thrashes out its problems with more vigor, and there’s some genuine anger and heat coming off of Cryer as the daughter. She’s bitter that her father is clearly dying, and she snipes wittily at her mother. She breaks off her engagement to the devastated Ken, played adorably by Reg Rogers as a sad sack with a Simon-ized wicked tongue, who looks like a cross between Ray Bolger and Judd Nelson. He also somewhat puzzlingly continues hanging around the house after the kiss-off.

Josie, in the meantime, is pursued somewhat oddly by Vinnie Bavasi (Peter Rini), a Mafia-related “foreign car distributor” as out of place with Josie’s family as lasagna at a Seder. Vinnie’s mangling of the English language (he makes “diamond-entrusted” jewelry with gold links so fine they are “intraceptable”) gets tired, but Rini is winning in the part. Even more oddly, it is not Vinnie but Ken’s best friend Ray (Matt Letscher), who has brought along Sammii (a Jennifer Tilly-voiced Katie Finneran), a blond model off the rack from stupid-land. The jokes at her expense are the cheapest.

*

The cast is strong; Rogers and Cryer stand out as the funniest and the most fully alive. Bishop can also field a punch line steadfastly in character. As Ray, the golf pro/novelist, Letscher is also funny, but his character is thin. He’s but a decent young man momentarily afraid of love. As Clemma’s long-lost husband, Mel Winkler is touching when sheepishly confessing his sins, but both he and Caldwell come off as a little too neat and homespun. These were the days before civil rights, the contented Clemma recalls, though everyone was civil to her and she was the one in the family with all the rights. It’s not clear what all those rights were, except that she was treated warmly while cooking and cleaning.

It cannot be said that young director Joe Mantello injects a new energy into Simon; instead, he serves and protects the laughs, which come regularly. Interestingly, Simon has borrowed a structural trick from the Mantello-directed “Love! Valour! Compassion!” (which Terrence McNally in turn borrowed from Brian Friel’s “Dancing at Lughnasa”), in which a late-breaking scene reveals to us the character’s fates and then returns us to the chronological action forearmed with news of their mortality the characters can’t know.

This is a mellow play, no doubt too mellow for some. But it’s not like the depressing jello the diet-restricted Burt complains about. “Proposals” is more like a pudding that’s simmered for a very long time. It goes down so smoothly you can just barely distinguish the complexity underneath.

* “Proposals,” Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., Tue.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 2 p.m. Also July 27, Aug. 3 and 10, 7:30 p.m.; Aug. 14, 21, 28, 2 p.m. Ends Aug. 31. $15-$52.50. (213) 628-2772. Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

“Proposals,”

L. Scott Caldwell: Clemma Diggins

Ron Rifkin: Burt Hines

Suzanne Cryer: Josie Hines

Reg Rogers: Ken Norman

Matt Letscher: Ray Dolenz

Kelly Bishop: Annie Robbins

Reter Rini: Vinnie Bavasi

Katie Finneran: Sammii

Mel Winkler: Lewis Barnett

A Center Theatre Group and Emanuel Azenberg production. By Neil Simon. Directed by Joe Mantello. Sets John Lee Beatty. Costumes Jane Greenwood. Lights Brian MacDevitt. Sound Tom Clark. Incidental music Stephen Flaherty. Production stage manager Philip Cusack.