Word: mel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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With a natural style essential to Simon plays, Achtman and McPhee display their characters' foibles coping with absurd situations--a robbery, for instance, in which the thieves steal everything but Mel's khaki pants--until Mel flips out. As his life unravels Achtman builds to a Vesuvius-like explosion. Eventually regaining control, he learns a new perspective, distinguishing the true necessities of life his cache of East Side luxuries...
Simon's Edna is not a well-developed character; she often serves as a sounding board for Mel. Nevertheless, McPhee maintains a reasoned voice. Not surprisingly, when Edna finds a job after Mel has lost his, she also assumes his original neurotic qualities. Act Two's opening marvelously reveals this switch as Simon contrasts Mel's aimless wandering with Edna's verbal rambling. They also tend to philosophize; in the course of the play they wonder anxiously about their existence. To Edna's assertion that you either live with life's problems or get out, Mel replies that human beings...
Director Scott Weiner has developed successfully the psyches of his main characters. We get a sense that despite the tortuous screams and yells that pass between Mel and Edna, they truly love and respect each other. Weiner's effort comes, however, at the expense of the staging and the more technical matters of the play. He confines the actors to small areas of the stage. Simon claims there is no breathing space in the entire city; Weiner's direction drives the point home with claustrophobic regularity...
Worse, Weiner's direction is often bland and static. He sidesteps many potential moments of comedic action. This is nowhere more apparent than in the family scene of Act Two; there is virtually no movement. Visiting Mel's apartment for the first time in nine years, his overbearing sisters do not even give it a cursory examination...
There are also major problems with the tone of this scene. After a finely controlled, realistic first act, Weiner miscalculates and guides the supporting actors into buffoonish caricatures. The actresses attempting Mel's sisters show no subtlety and more annoying, don't seem to believe in their characters as real people. Even their costumes are cartoonish and inappropriate. As Mel's constrained brother Harry, Jamie Orenstein aims at a fuller characterization, but remains rather wooden...