Review: Laughter on the 23rd Floor by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs

Neil Simon's set-up for Laughter on the 23rd Floor is simple and classic, if you can abstract from the biographic aspects of it.  A newcomer enthusing about his new job discovers that his work colleagues are eccentrics, each more bizarre and devastatingly verbal than the previous one.  Their employer, initially unseen, has enormous stature with the public, but they all know that he is a generous, distracted borderline psycho.  Set 'em ricocheting off one another, bring the boss in, interrupt it from time to time as the newcomer addresses the audience with a rueful smile.  Eventually, toward the middle of the second half, pressures from craven commercialism and philistinism bring about the disbanding of the work unit, with much sentiment among its members and the megalomaniac disbelief of the boss.

With slight adjustments and a naval theme, you could be on board ship with Mr. Roberts or with Captain Queeg or with William Bligh.  Or before Agincourt with Henry V.  These few, this band of brothers, they bind together and then disappear into memory, greater and even more eccentric than they really were. This particular ship is an office in a New York skyscraper where the eccentrics are comedy sketch writers, the boss is a neurotic comedy star on live television in the early 1950's, and the newcomer is a surrogate for the playwright, Neil Simon.

Simon and his brother Danny did indeed write for live television before Simon embarked on his series of sweet and often nostalgic comedies.  Sid Caesar saw a review they'd put together in a Catskills resort and hired them to write for his Show of Shows with a team that included the most successful writers, comedians and writer-comedians of the time.  The Wikipedia article on this piece offers a table linking Simon's eccentrics with the real live eccentrics who probably inspired them, including Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbard, Carl Reiner and more.

But beware of such simple equations.  The writer's imagination transforms his raw material, particularly when he's writing almost 40 years after the fact.  Laughter on the 23rd Floor opened in New York in 1993 and ran for 323 performances; in London, Gene Wilder starred in a production that ran for five months.

But as one character comments, "All comedy is based on pain."  Simon draws these writers with a pen delicately tipped in acid, making them far more real for us than the characters they were creating in the 1950's.  Newcomer Lucas (Blake Smith) is the all-American white-bread exception, unless you count Helen the secretary (Kimberly Barrow).  Huck Huckaby is Milt, the sarcastic and unhappily married wearer of a beret; Steve Shearer is Val the Russian Jewish emigré who hates Stalin. Brian Coughlin is the self-aggrandizing Irish-American -- also named Brian -- who dreams of going to Hollywood.

Jason Newman is the collegiate smart guy who keeps them all on track; and David Stahl is Ira the hypochondriac.  Jenny Larson is Carol, the "feminine touch" on the team, as hard as nails.  It's a nice assortment, almost as good as the platoon you would get in a World War II movie.

Simon inserts some really sharp edges -- Joe McCarthy, the writer's blacklist, memories of Hitler and World War II.  He cuts loose with four-letter words, too.  Writing in 1993 and looking back toward a time shortly after Norman Mailer felt obliged to accept an editor's substitution of "fug" throughout his 1948 war novel The Naked and the Dead, Simon includes happy banter between Milt the huckster and Val the Russian about the correct pronunciation of that common four-letter double fricative.  Facing funding reductions in Act II, Max Prince rants about the economics of "shit! shit! shit!" on television, some ten years before Newton Minnow called it a "vast wasteland."

The melancholy turn in Act II comes with the sponsor's decision to end the show, one that the stunned star Max Prince presents in a distracted, rambling story as a total victory for his side.  Here again, beware of confusing Simon world with Ceasar world.  In fact, Caesar's Show of Shows was indeed canceled -- and he came roaring back the next year with an hour-long variety show for which he had total editorial control.  He stayed on top in television for another ten years in variations of that format.

The comedy in this piece is actor-driven, dependent on the players' sharpness in establishing the eccentrics.  The range is wide.  David Stokey as the bewildered, possibly self-destructive genius Max Prince is a riveting presence, a man with demons so large that much of the time he can't focus on persons right in front of him.  Steve Shearer does a nice turn as the wry Russian, Val.  David Stahl uses a modulation of a familiar, expostulating persona to create hypochondriac Ira.  Jenny Larson is an unexpected raucous delight with a huge Bronx accent and unflappable demeanor.  Huck Huckaby as Milt is supposed to be a veteran of the borscht circuit, but his accent is weak and his timing is abysmal, as if he had never told a joke punctuated afterwards by a derisive drum roll and cymbal crash.  He comes across as a guy who couldn't tell a knish from a nebbish (. . . pause. . . ba-da-Boom!).

Laughter on the 23rd Floor is lively and often surprising with just the right touch of faux nostalgia.  You'll laugh.  I did, and so did everyone else in the house.

Review by Lois for the austinpost.com, February 28

Review by Robert Faires in the Austin Chronicle, March 17

Review by Olin Meadows at AustinOnStage.com, March 18

EXTRAS

Click to view program for Laughter on the 23rd Floor by Austin Playhouse

Hits as of 2015 03 01: 1640

Laughter on the 23rd Floor
by Neil Simon
Austin Playhouse