New Plays: Plaza Suite

NEW PLAYS Plaza Suite A Neil Simon comedy is a small body of plot surrounded by laughter. He and Director Mike Nichols are Broadway’s most consummate mirtholo-gists. Playgoers at Plaza Suite don’t have their ribs merely tickled, but tackled—by Simon, Nichols and two other professionals in top form, George C. Scott and Maureen Stapleton.

The evening consists of a trio of one-acters, all set in Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel. Each of the playlets concerns a middle-aged man (Scott) and woman (Stapleton) who are at the end of something rather than the beginning of anything. The underlying tone of much of the humor is that of middle-aged rue mocking itself, the slightly hysterical funmaking that springs less from high spirits than low morale.

In Visitor from Mamaroneck, a relentlessly chirpy wife indulges in a scatterbrained fit of sentimental nostalgia. She revisits the scene of her honeymoon—but was it 23, or 24 years ago? —with secret hopes of reigniting the ardors of early love. Her husband is a taut rather than tired businessman who has kept his eye on his weight and his secretary. The wife has suspected as much: “You were working three nights a week—we weren’t getting any richer.” She seems put out that her husband had no more enterprise than to pick his secretary as bedmate. Along with the jesting banter and bitchiness of the much married comes a feeling of poignancy for two people who find that love, like the sand in a thousand breakfast egg timers, has run out.

Visitor from Hollywood is a case of seductio ad absurdum. It rests on the somewhat shaky premise that a Hollywood producer would set up an afternoon rendezvous with a suburban ma tron he once dated—17 years before—in order to kill an hour in bed. There is more lacquer than lecher in Scott’s peacock-of-the-walk performance, but Stapleton is properly kittenish as she downs vodka stingers until she can only feel the bites on her neck.

Scott’s triumph is Visitor from Forest Hills, a zany wedding tableau in which an irate father, pressed past mind and pocketbook, cannot budge his distraught daughter out of a locked bathroom to the altar. He threatens, he cajoles, he implores. He nearly breaks his arm ramming the door. He rends his cutaway till it looks like sackcloth and he looks like ashes. Scott’s countenance of epic frustration is phenomenally funny: a middle-aged Lear confronted with a thankless offspring. The evening’s master treat, a carnival of sight-and-sound gags, this skit shows how Simon and Nichols can take a sit uation no bigger than a snowball and dislodge an avalanche of hilarity.