<b>✭✭✭</b>✩✩
<b>by Neil Simon, directed by Ted Dykstra
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
July 26-September 22, 2012
</b>
“Sunshine without Shadows”
As Soulpepper’s current production of <i>The Sunshine Boys</i> ended, I realized that after two hours I knew virtually nothing about the two main characters in the play. This is, of course, a play by Neil Simon, not Anton Chekhov. It seems Simon can’t ween himself from his fascination for set-ups and punchlines to create rounded characters and, so, in the final minutes of the play, has to plunge into sentimentality to suggest that, behind the jokes, his characters have some depth.
The subject of <i>The Sunshine Boys</i> from 1972 does have the potential to provide a richer experience that the usual Simon play since it deals with the death of a form of popular entertainment – vaudeville – and the aging of two fictional practitioners of the form – the famed duo of Lewis and Clark, likely based on such teams as Smith and Dale or Gallagher and Shean. In the play we first meet Willie Clark (Eric Peterson), who lives in a moderate state of squalor in an old hotel. Since he virtually never leaves the apartment or gets out of his pajamas, he is dependent on his nephew Ben (an earnest Jordan Pettle) to bring him newspapers and food. Ben is also his agent and has at last found Willie a gig. A television station is going to present a survey of comedy in America and wants Willie to perform. The only catch, as far as Willie is concerned, is that he must perform with Al Lewis (Kenneth Welsh), his former partner of 43 years, whom he hates.
Why does Willie hate Al? It seems that eleven years ago Al announced to Willie that he was retiring from show business, thus unwillingly forcing Willie to retire, too. The two haven’t spoken since then, but Ben is so confident that the money they two will receive for doing their famous “Doctor Sketch” on TV, that he has told Al to come down from New Jersey to rehearse with Willie.
Much of the humour of the play depend on a satire of getting old and on the attempts of the partners-now-enemies to rehearse. Willie answers the phone when the teakettle whistles and can never remember the names of Ben’s two children. Al and Willie are basically like older versions of Oscar and Felix in Simon’s <i>The Old Couple</i> (1965) with the character traits reassorted. Al is tidy and reserved while Willie is a slob prone to emotional outbursts. The best scene in the play is the longest glimpse we get of the “Doctor Sketch” that gives us some idea of what vaudeville was like – terrible jokes and puns and much politically incorrect leering at the prominent anterior and posterior rotundities of the lissom Nurse (Sarah Wilson in a hilarious performance).
While the play is tissue-thin, there is much more that director Ted Dykstra could make of it than he does. He directs the entire first act exactly as if it were a live sitcom and doesn’t seem to care that Pettle and Peterson haven’t mastered their New York Jewish accents. Given the play’s ending, he could have asked Peterson to leaven Willie’s perpetual crankiness with some sense of desperation instead of making him simply the stereotypical feisty senior. The same applies even more in the scene Willie has with his nurse (the very funny Quancetia Hamilton), where Willie could communicate some notion of his fear of helplessness. On the other hand, Dykstra draws a note-perfect performance from Welsh, who even in his silences communicates an empathy and even pity for his childishly obdurate partner.
We hear Willie tell Ben that he worked with Al because he was “the best” comic of the age, but Simon could explore levels of envy in Willie that would explain his rancour as well that given us some clue at all as to why Al would want to work with Willie for all those years. Simon never tells us what it was in Willie that would make “the best” link his showbiz life to him.
Patrick Clark has does an excellent job in creating both the grungy set of Willie’s apartment and the wobbly look of a vaudeville set for the “Doctor Sketch”. Depressing as it may be for some, we have to recognize in seeing Clark’s costumes and set details that he has carefully captured a period long gone. Louise Guinand’s lighting is as creative as ever, especially in simulating the overlit conditions of a television studio.
It is great to see Kenneth Welsh and Eric Peterson on stage together. <i>The Sunshine Boys</i> is usually used as a vehicle for veteran actors, but knowing what great performances they have given recently in other plays, their talent seems wasted on this piece of fluff.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a <i>Stage Door</i> exclusive.
Photo: Kenneth Welsh and Eric Peterson. ©2012 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit <a href="http://www.soulpepper.ca">http://www.soulpepper.ca</a>.
<b>2012-07-27</b>
<b>The Sunshine Boys</b>