Simon, With a French Accent

Born on the Fourth of July, Neil Simon has for decades written all-American variations on the French boulevard comedy. He gave us, memorably, the slob versus the neatnik. He wrote about growing up and learning how to write funny. He visited all sorts of hotel-suite slapstick and heartache set in Manhattan, Beverly Hills, London. And who knows what’s still in the trunk? “Fort Wayne Suite”?

“The Dinner Party,” Simon’s latest, made its world premiere Wednesday at the Mark Taper Forum, and it’s really a boulevard comedy. It’s determinedly French, set in a private dining room of a fine Paris restaurant, with French characters. Like Yasmina Reza’s deft, internationally traveled “Art,” an actual Parisian export, “The Dinner Party” runs just over an hour and half, no intermission, offering lightly swinging jazz (used here for exit music) as part of its overall package.

But this trip to the boulevard ends up in a cul-de-sac. Neither high comedy nor effective farce, Simon’s play has its moments; the best lines always get their man. But it’s odd and crabbed, a survey of marital wreckage and 11th-hour salvage jobs. It’s a premise waiting to be developed.

Simon is concerned here with resolving the pain and tangle of divorce, and he’s brave enough to include two characters who have twice divorced each other, an experience Simon shares. You wonder, though, if “The Dinner Party” wouldn’t have acquired some momentum if Simon had simply turned on a fountain of vindictive alimony jokes. “I feel like I’m talking to a machine spitting out poisonous tennis balls,” one character says. You have to take his word for it.

The play’s framework resembles Simon’s script for the 1976 film “Murder by Death.” Five people have been invited to a private dinner in the back room of La Cassette, at the behest of their unseen lawyer. First to arrive is rare-books dealer Claude Pichon (John Ritter), a smooth and cultured guy. He’s followed by the unsmooth auto-rental manager Albert Donay (Henry Winkler, who seems here to have morphed into Edward Everett Horton).

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The same lawyer handled both their divorce cases, as well as the divorce of guest No. 3, men’s-wear magnate Andre Bouville (Edward Herrmann, nice and dry). Then come the ladies: Mariette Levieux (the wittily short-tempered Anette Michelle Sanders, taking over the role originally cast with Rita Wilson), who’s Claude’s ex, and tetched, behind-the-beat Yvonne Fouchet (Veanne Cox), formerly married to Albert. The sixth guest turns out to be the mastermind, as well as a sort of group-therapy leader, played by Frances Conroy.

Simon sets it up like a murder mystery and acknowledges the artifice throughout, to the extent that someone late in the game says, “It’s a god---- Agatha Christie dinner!” Fatally, though, “The Dinner Party” lets the audience get way out ahead of a pretty simple setup. The banter relies increasingly on the brittle, venal, quasi-masochistic relationship of Herrmann and Conroy. Simon doesn’t seem to have the ear for this sort of archness. And near the end, he falls prey to so much psychotherapeutic failed-marriage dissection, it’s as if the script itself were shrink-wrapped.

Director John Rando and a generally fine ensemble can do only so much to make sense of the material’s nutty internal contradictions. There’s a terrific moment when Cox goes a little nutty herself, finally free of her passive-aggressive stalker ex-husband. She does a quick series of leaps and jumps and sprints, a Jules Feiffer performance artist come to life. And although the bit belongs to a different play, you don’t care.

Ritter’s the audience-identification figure, by default. He displays a crafty sense of timing, though at times his look of confusion makes you wonder if he’s not reviewing, say, “The Dinner Party.” Winkler’s schlub exists in a separate comic universe--Bitsville--but he nabs his share of laughs. Conroy seems to be eyeing a trade, this play for a Restoration comedy to be named later.

The design team behind Simon’s previous play, “Proposals,” staged two years ago at the Ahmanson, returns here. John Lee Beatty’s swanky dining room is graced by Jane Greenwood’s costumes and Brian MacDevitt’s lighting. The trappings work.

The last really good Simon play, “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” wasn’t good simply because it was closer to Simon’s own life and idiom. It was good because its characters, gag writers, were allowed to breathe. (Simon’s characters throughout the years have always tended to sound like gag writers; here, he finally wrote a stage full of them.) The air is stifling here. “The Dinner Party” feels a little like “Art,” a little like Alan Ayckbourn in its marital acridity, a little like the recent French film (based on a play) “The Dinner Game.” And not enough like Neil Simon.

* “The Dinner Party,” Mark Taper Forum, Music Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. No performances Dec. 24-25, Dec. 31 or Jan. 1. Additional performances: 8 p.m. Dec. 20 and Dec. 27; 2:30 p.m. Dec. 23 and Dec. 30. Ends Jan. 16. $33-$42. (213) 628-2772 or https://www.TaperAhmanson.com. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

John Ritter: Claude Pichon

Henry Winkler: Albert Donay

Edward Herrmann: Andre Bouville

Anette Michelle Sanders: Mariette Levieux

Veanne Cox: Yvonne Fouchet

Frances Conroy: Gabrielle Buonocelli

Written by Neil Simon. Directed by John Rando. Set by John Lee Beatty. Costumes by Jane Greenwood. Lighting by Brian MacDevitt. Sound by Jon Gottlieb. Production stage manager Mary Michele Miner.