One-Liners Drive Simon’s Tribute

At last Neil Simon has found the perfect milieu for his incessant one-liners. What causes the titular “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” at the Long Beach Playhouse’s Studio Theatre, is not the dialogue of ordinary folk. The bare, brightly lit room on the 23rd floor is where the gag writers for the Max Prince television show are sequestered, pounding out sketches week by week. Of course this group revels in the one-liner. It’s their job.

The play, especially in this production, is really a sort of love letter from Simon to the man who gave him his first job writing for television: Sid Caesar. Caesar’s “The Show of Shows” was for many years the hottest property in television. And if Simon’s comedy looks like a love letter, that’s exactly how director Richard Perloff and his exceptional cast treat it.

There is little plot here, and that’s fine. A plot would really mess up Simon’s comic toboggan ride through the last days of the top show on the tube. The humor, and the gags, are among Simon’s finest, because they’re coming out of the mouths of seven characters who innately think funnily, trying their best to be hilarious for the boss and trying at the same time to outshine one another.

Sean Small’s scenic design really does look like one of those aged business buildings in midtown Manhattan, and Perloff’s actors look as though they’ve inhabited it for the years the show has been on the air. There isn’t a flaw in Perloff’s staging. His tempos are as crisp as can be, and the rhythms within the scenes are full of edgy reality. He knows his comedy technique.

The cast is smashing. As Simon’s alter ego, narrator Lucas Brickman, Jared Slater has an ingenuous charm and the right sound of a kid from Brooklyn on the way up. Roger Galloway, as Milt Fields, the writer who’ll do anything for a laugh except upset the boss, gives his character just the right edge of insecurity behind his bravado.

David A. Levine’s Russian immigrant, head writer Val Sklosky, is a solid piece of underplaying that works beautifully, especially in his mispronunciation of a four-letter word that eventually results in one of the play’s funniest lines. Pregnant Carol Wyman is the only female writer on the staff, and her slightly rough edges are captured with honesty and sometimes touching truth by Carolyn Barnes.

Scott Arroyo’s hypochondriac Ira Stone, whose daily announcements of his imminent demise are one of Simon’s neatest inventions here, is never overdone, and Arroyo’s look of a puppy playing a game is on target.

Lane Fragomeli, as Brian Doyle, who dreams daily of signing a Hollywood contract, is excellent, as is Sarah Paalman as Prince’s dumb secretary, whose goal is to be a gag writer. At the performance reviewed, director Perloff stepped into the role of ailing actor-as-writer Kenny Franks and made it look as though it was his role.

The trickiest role belongs to the big guy himself, and Tom Anderson is astounding as Max Prince. Anderson’s understanding of Prince’s self-absorption, balanced by his childlike love for his writers, is amazing, and he even seems to become Sid Caesar when Prince is rehearsing a sketch for that week’s program. If there’s any doubt who Simon is writing about, the sketch has Prince imitating Marlon Brando as--who else?--Julius Caesar.

BE THERE

“Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” Long Beach Playhouse Studio Theatre, 5021 E. Anaheim St. 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Aug. 3 and 24. Ends Aug. 30. $10-$15. (562) 494-1616. Running time: 2 hours.