Review: Neil Simon's Proposals at Apple Hill Playhouse (2001)
Neil Simon's Proposals opened Apple Hill's 2001 adult mainstage season in June. This archived Pittsburgh Post-Gazette review describes it as a bittersweet nostalgia comedy and weighs how the Delmont company handled Simon's mix of laughs and melancholy.
By Walter Evert
Neil Simon's "Proposals" is a mixed bag of very entertaining stuff. It's a comedy, of course -- that's what Simon is all about -- but a comedy that gets its laughs from the very real tensions that have trapped a lot of down-home, decent folks.
"Proposals"
WHERE: Apple Hill Playhouse, Manor Road, off Route 22, Delmont.
WHEN: Through June 30. Thurs.-Sat. 8 p.m.; some 2 p.m. matinees.
Not everyone in "Proposals" is lovable -- there are losers, clowns, con men and louts -- but, for the most part, they hurt only themselves, and we accept them in the narrative tapestry. Think "Our Town" and its melancholy sweetness.
To prevent the audience's suffering too much on behalf of the good characters, there are a couple of distancing devices. For one, we are not watching these people thrash around in real time -- it all happened a half-century ago. For another, what we see on stage are the recollections of the family housekeeper, whose memories are acted out by the participants.
The housekeeper also has a past and, at play's opening, an unresolved present. Indeed, as the 50-year-old action unfolds on stage, everyone has an unresolved present, and resolving them constitutes the play's action.
What we see is the everyday action of ordinary life: growing up, first love, second love, third love, divorce, bitterness and various degrees of reconciliation and/or armed truce, with the overhanging threat of a beloved character's fatal disease, all in the dual perspectives of the housekeeper's narration and the audience's vicarious involvement.
On stage most of the time, as daughter Josie, is Rebecca Tong, whose performance as the coming-of-age love interest is as good as it gets. Her father, played by Dennis Kerr, is the one with heart disease, which is probably why when not on stage he is at an upstairs window, eavesdropping (out of fatherly concern) on Josie's encounters with her suitors. Hoping to reconcile his daughter with his hoity-toity ex-wife (Patricia Beyer), now remarried and living in Paris, he asks her to return for a visit that satisfies no one.
The suitors include Robert L. Campanna III as an amiable but klutzy fellow who can't even toss a stone into the woods without killing a bird; Michael Kokolis as small-time gambler and Mafia figure who danced with Josie once in Miami and can't get her out of his mind; and Michael J. Puskar as a sometime golf pro and novelist (David Turka, tripling as stage manager and lights/sound operator, played that part on the day I saw the show).
Leah Delcoco plays the sort of character who gets a female quartet together to sing "Amazing Grace" over a dead sparrow, and David Early is the ne'er-do-well drifter who comes back to ask for reconciliation with the housekeeper.
Mary Clemmons plays the key part of housekeeper and narrator with authority, and her fine performance holds this production of "Proposals" together.
Walter Evert is a freelance writer.