You might think when the Maltz Jupiter Theatre takes a break from its usual musical menu to produce a comedy like Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite that the task is easier.
Not so, says director J. Barry Lewis, the Maltz’s go-to guy when it comes to staging Simon’s plays. “They’re always a challenge, there’s no doubt about it,” he says. “It’s one of the oldest sayings in the theater world, ‘Dying is easy, it’s comedy that’s hard.’ And there is much truth in that, because comedy under the best of circumstances is situational, and it’s also dependent upon good writing and an audience responding to that good writing, hopefully.
“It’s about not just trying to be funny, but trying to be honest. To find the truth behind the storyline.”
Having directed Barefoot in the Park and Brighton Beach Memoirs at the Maltz, Lewis now takes on Plaza Suite, three short plays that all take place in Suite 719 of the iconic upscale New York City hotel.
“I think the challenge of ‘Plaza Suite’ is that it’s three plays,” says Jim Ireland, who plays the male lead in all three pieces. “Where you normally have the gift of bringing things back from Act One into Act Two that makes them funnier, we don’t really have that luxury here. One thing that Barry said is he wanted to cast people who would work with him on making this more than a Saturday Night Live sketch. To delve into the text and make each play really meaningful.”
In the curtain-raiser, “The Visitor from Mamaroneck,” a business executive and his wife celebrate their anniversary in the hotel where they spent their honeymoon decades ago. But their marriage is now fraying, as she suspects that he is having an affair.
“One of Simon’s themes in many of his works is infidelity,” notes Lewis. “Marriages can grow stale and he explores what happens when they grow stale. If infidelity comes into play, what do you do with it?”
This first play is the most dramatic of the three, foreshadowing the darker tone of the playwright’s late career works. As Ireland mentions, “Barry commented early in rehearsals, people are going to say at intermission, ‘This is a Neil Simon play?’”
Just wait. “As we get into (‘Plaza Suite’’s) later plays, we get a broader, more physical comedy,” Lewis says assuringly. The second playlet, “The Visitor from Hollywood,” is the reunion of high school sweethearts. He has become a successful movie director, eager to seduce the starstruck New Jersey housewife. The third scene, “The Visitor from Forest Hills,” is the broadest, most physical comedy. In it, a bride-to-be has locked herself in the suite’s bathroom, reluctant to get married because she fears becoming like her bickering parents.
“What I love about these plays is that we find three couples who are sort of in the middle of their lives. They’re established,” says Kathy McCafferty, who plays the three female leads. “And this one day, this one moment, in this hotel, something completely unexpected happens. And they’re not prepared for it. It’s not sitcom, but it has everything to do with the situation these characters find themselves in. And I hope that’s funny. I think so.”
Simon, America’s most commercially successful playwright and screenwriter, is known for creating comedy out of conflict. “Comedy is the fine line between pain, pathos, and that which is funny,” explains Lewis. “And that which is funny is sometimes the most painful.”
In Plaza Suite, the hotel is an important element of the situation. “It’s worth mentioning that they’re middle-class people put in a high-class hotel,” says McCafferty. “This is inherently just outside their comfort zone. The first couple spent their honeymoon in that hotel, but they haven’t been back. So this is a special event for them. It’s not the norm for these folks to be in the Plaza Hotel,” which increases the stakes in each scene.
Plaza Suite was written in 1968, more than 55 years ago, long before the #MeToo movement, when our attitudes about male-female relationships were very different. Lewis sets the Maltz revival in the late ‘60s, hoping to take some of the sting off the sexist humor.
“People ask, ‘Does his work hold up today?’ Well, some yes, some no. Some better than others,” answers Lewis. “And times change. What we saw 50 years ago and what we see today, and how we accept how relationships work, is different now from then. The challenge is to find the freshness within the text, so that those universal thoughts have relevance for today.”
“My hope and my challenge is that people will recognize something familiar in it and they will connect to what is timeless about these couples,” adds McCafferty. “And about marriage and about how we deal with the people that we love. And I hope that people will laugh at themselves as they laugh at us.”
PLAZA SUITE, Maltz Jupiter Theatre, 1001 E. Indiantown Rd., Jupiter. From Thurs., Feb. 15 – Sun., Feb. 25. $50 – $95. 561-575-2223.