| Take a bittersweet bite out of the Big Apple as a
Manhattan couple’s economic crisis turns existential.
This is downsizing, before it became a way of life.
Comic and poignant, the story bubbles with Simon’s
trademark snappy dialogue and quirky characters.
Read Wikipedia entry on "The Prisoner of Second Avenue"
From a New York Times review
of a 2009 revival: "There are no jobs for 47-year-old
men!” wails the newly and miserably unemployed Mel Edison in
Neil Simon’s temper-tantrum comedy The Prisoner of Second
Avenue. The plaintive cry elicits robust chuckles of
sympathy during our own season of seething economic angst.
“Is the whole world going out of
business?” moans Mel’s equally beleaguered wife, Edna, when she
too is faced with sudden job loss.
Boy, do we feel your pain, Mel and Edna. The trials endured by
this middle-class Manhattan couple strike a distinctly
contemporary chord. Noisy neighbors, wailing sirens, burglaries
and fridges on the fritz may be the wallpaper of urban-nightmare
stories from the 1970s, but this comedy has a real sting now.
The play’s depiction of a couple facing an economic crisis that
gradually turns existential, and the family that gathers to
offer support (and ancillary wisecracks ) in their time of
trouble, has a startling resonance.
Read more from New York Times article
From a recent New Yorker essay on Neil Simon
by John Lahr: "[In] Simon’s comedy... hilarity is
teased out of the ordinary. Simon often notices audiences
sighing in recognition at certain lines in his plays. “You’d
hear an ‘aah’ from the audience, a sound of ‘My God, that’s me,’
” he told me... In “The Prisoner of Second Avenue” (1971), for
instance, the dyspeptic Mel Edison, demented by the pressures of
city living, flops down on a sofa stacked with pillows. “You
can’t even sit in here,” he bellows at his wife, pulling a puffy
pillow out from behind him and throwing it on the floor. “Why do
you keep these ugly little pillows on here? You spend eight
hundred dollars for chairs and then you can’t sit on it because
you got ugly little pillows shoved up your back.” “There is no
joke there,” Simon said. “Yet, it was an enormous laugh —
because the audience identified... It’s a shared secret between
me and the audience.”
Read more from the New Yorker essay
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![Daniel Stengel in "Scrooge The Musical" 2009 [Photo: Phil Baumgaertner]](2009/Scrooge_81x81.jpg)
Mainstage Season
