Review: The Odd Couple by The Georgetown Palace Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Touchstone themes for the Georgetown Palace Theatre are "fun" and "familiar." Probably the most affectionately remembered piece of Neil Simon's 40-year career, The Odd Couple fits both themes exactly.
Slobby Oscar Madison and meticulous Felix Ungar are seated firmly in the American consciousness. Simon's play opened on Broadway in 1965 and appeared as a film in 1968. It ran for five years as a television show, 1970-1975. ABC cancelled it at the end of every season but then brought it back because of the high Nielsen ratings for the summer reruns. Simon rewrote the play for a female cast in 1985 and in 2004 he produced an updated version, Oscar and Felix: A New Look at the Odd Couple.
The Georgetown version is the original script, set in the mid-60s. You can tell that immediately when the guys talk about prices. A New York cab ride is $1.30. A pack of cigarettes is 38 cents. The butcher's bill for London broil for four persons is $9.64. And Felix's half of the monthly rent for the eight-room apartment in metropolitan New York City is $120 (rent-controlled, for sure, but still!).
So we know what we're getting when we settle into our seats at the Georgetown Palace, and we have some pretty strong templates for the principal characters: Walter Matthau and Jack Klugman as messy Oscar; Jack Lemon and Tony Randall as picky Felix (a role originated on Broadway by the marvelous Art Carney, television-famous as Ed Norton in The Honeymooners).
The comic gap is between the poker-playing, sports loving, heedless extrovert, guys -- call 'em jocks -- and their friend Felix. This weekly poker game has been running for 15 years, most recently at Oscar's apartment, made more available because his wife has left him. Clutter, trash and old socks are spread across the living room.
Felix fails to appear, for the very first time, baffling the cigar-smoking, beer-swilling card players. They learn, eventually, that Felix's wife has put him out of the house, she is keeping their two children, and she doesn't care what happens to him.
Knowing Felix's neurotic nature, the guys are convinced that the man has decided to attempt suicide. When he finally shows up, there's a lot of funny business. The guys pretend not to know the situation but they scramble to close the windows in Oscar's 12th floor apartment and they can't decide whether to let Felix use the bathroom alone. Eventually, in a moment of weakness and generosity, Oscar urges Felix to share the huge apartment with him.
And as we all know, it's a non-marriage made in hell. Palace stagehands spend the intermission cleaning up the apartment and setting it to rights. When the poker game reconvenes, it's in a setting of fussy perfection presided over by Felix as the -- what? Maître d'hôtel, I guess, would be the most accurate characterisation.
For the rest of the play we enjoy the oddness of this couple. It's a contest of personalities and at the same time a clever satire on marriage or any long-term relationship. Anyone is bound to irritate a partner; cohabitation is the process of wearing smooth those rough spots or learning how to avoid them. Simon makes it funny by taking both partners to the extremes of personality and by giving Felix many attributes more characteristic of a woman. Back in the 1960s that was an even bigger laugh than it is now.
Big brash Joe Penrod is tailor-made for the role of Oscar. He's loud, funny and larger than life. Penrod has a fine sense of comic timing, playing Oscar as an extrovert with eloquent body language and facial expression. Oscar is a guy's guy, a sportswriter who loves the big pleasures in life: beer, poker, loud talk and dames. My only misgiving is tiny: that turned-around ball cap in the first act is a huge anachronism. It's a style that originated about 40 years later.
The famous actors who have played Felix Ungar have usually come from the long American tradition of neurotically self-aware comedians. Lemon and Randall were of this school. Others in American entertainment have included, for example, Bob Newhart, Wally Cox and even Jack Benny. This is a character who is aware of his own foibles, self-observant, but unable to resist them. . . there's often a delicious moment when we observe the introvert evaluating a situation, wincing slightly, milking the pause and then taking action.
In the Georgetown Palace production Vincent Doenges as the bald, bespectacled Felix Ungar gives us something surprisingly different. His Felix is full of quirks and self-absorption, but he is fast on the uptake, quick in reply, and emphatically himself. He laments his fate but he doesn't show many self doubts. It's a funny, convincing portrayal. A modern equivalent of this Felix, also an anachronism, might be a man who grew up with ADHD and prevailed over it by establishing a rigidly controlled set of patterns and rituals.
Oscar's never a real grump, as irritated as Penrod may become, and Felix is rarely a real pain in the ass. Yes, they snipe at one another's behavior but one sees developing through the play the co-dependency that's the other essential aspect of any life as a couple.
The gang of poker-playing guys is a rowdy, entertaining bunch, and by virtue of the casting and the direction each comes forth as individual and memorable. The daft, twittering Pigeon sisters Cecily and Emily (Arden Baxter and Virginia Keeley) are way over the top.
But that's okay. After all, this is a play about guys.
Right?
EXTRA
Click to view excerpts from program of The Odd Couple by the Georgetown Palace Theatre
Hits as of 2015 03 01: 1670
The Odd Couple
by Neil Simon
Georgetown Palace Theatre
