The three one-act playlets of Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite have two things in common. They all take place in Suite 719 of New York’s swank Plaza Hotel and they all have a jaundiced view of marriage.
OK, two more things. They each run a little too long for their own good and they each feel a little outdated in 2024.
Plaza Suite hails from 1968, the fourth play by Simon to open on Broadway and to be embraced by comedy-starved audiences. But whereas the first three — Come Blow Your Horn, Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple — drew on his personal life, Plaza Suite is based solely on his desire to entertain and an urge to have a new play of his open that season.
The production at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre is fitfully entertaining, though that is largely due to Kathy McCafferty and Jim Ireland, the two versatile, tireless performers featured in all three plays. Yes, they rely on Simon’s comic framework, but they elevate the material with their deft delivery — some truthful, some pure schtick — that will leave a smile on your face, though probably not double you over with laughter.
Credit Simon, the most successful commercial playwright in America, with experimenting with darker waters in the curtain-raiser, “The Visitor from Mamaroneck.” In it, the long-wed Sam and Karen Nash — married 23 or 24 years, depending on whom you ask — are celebrating their anniversary in the hotel, and possibly the suite, where they had honeymooned.
He is a high-achieving executive, immersed in perusing contracts and belittling his wife. She is more of a romantic, eager to rekindle their stalled marriage, but afraid that he has begun an affair with his secretary. Simon sprinkles one-liners throughout the scene, but the tone is mainly serious, pitched to holding a mirror to his “tired businessman” target audience.
If that first playlet foreshadows the dramatic writer that Simon would grow into, the following two harken back to the sketch comedy he began his career with on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows.
Act Two, “The Visitor from Hollywood,” reunites Jesse Kiplinger and Muriel Tate, 17 years after they were high school sweethearts. He is now a twice-divorced powerful movie producer and she is a married-with-children New Jersey housewife. Still, he has invited her to his suite, hoping to seduce her, and she finds his Tinseltown namedropping intoxicating. Or maybe it is the vodka stingers, but either way, there is something sour about the scene in our post-#MeToo world.
The third play, “The Visitor from Forest Hills,” introduces Roy and Norma Hubley, the father and mother of the bride at an imminent wedding seven floors below. But their daughter Mimsey has locked herself in the suite’s bathroom, fearing that marriage will turn her and her husband into a bickering pair like her parents. Their efforts to draw her out of the john involves some sublime physical comedy, particularly from Ireland’s Roy.
By 1968, Simon was still in the first of his five marriages, a happy union, according to Chapter Two. But he understood the comic potential in conflict, which he mines well in Plaza Suite. Director J. Barry Lewis, the Maltz’s go-to guy when it comes to staging Simon, orchestrates the marital strife with skill, from the slow burn of the opening scene to the manic mirth of the third.
McCafferty, previously seen locally in dramas by Tennessee Williams and Lillian Hellman, demonstrates an unexpected affinity for comedy here as the three wives. And such is her ability to differentiate them — with an assist from wig designer Kevin S. Foster II — that you may find yourself checking your program to verify they are all the same actress.
Whether from the writing or McCafferty’s expert timing, she comes off somewhat better than her scene partner, Ireland. Still, he comes on strong in the third vignette as the blustery, exasperated father of the bride, bemoaning his daughter’s stubbornness and the cost of each wedding line item.
Anne Mundell’s elegantly appointed hotel suite set in a visual treat, as is the stage-wide Plaza Hotel post card show curtain. And Robin L. McGee clearly had fun designing the character-rich period costumes.
Of the 30-plus plays and musicals Simon wrote during his lengthy career, Plaza Suite ranks somewhere in the middle of the pack. It contains enough to divert us for two-and-a-half hours, even as it falls short of being memorable.
PLAZA SUITE, Maltz Jupiter Theatre, 1001 E. Indiantown Rd., Jupiter. Through Sunday, Feb. 25. $50-$95. 561-575-2223 or visit jupitertheatre.org.