Word: wife
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...George's wife has been dead a year when the play opens, and George (Jerry Orbach) still grieves, stolidly refusing efforts of his brother Leo (Herbert Edelman) to fix him up. While researching material for a new book, George accidentally phones one of Leo's prospects, an actress named Jennie (Marilyn Redfield), whose recent divorce leaves her, like George, resigned to the second chapter of her life, and being urged to date, by a friend, Faye (Jane A. Johnston). Intrigued by their mutual reluctance to get involved, Jennie and George meet, discover their minds--work in the same rhythm...
...therein lies the problem. George cannot reconcile the affection he feels for Jennie with his memory of his first wife Barbara; his desire for happiness clashes with the luxury of self-pity. The fact that his new wife does not condemn his compulsive comparison of spouses only provokes him to lash out at her. "You leave me so much room to be cruel in," he explains, contrite but unrepenitent. The couple becomes trapped in a vicious circle of guilt, anger, compassion, and fresh guilt...
...most of Simon's plays, the theme has an autobiographical overtone. In many ways. George represents Simon, who has said he shared his character's turmoil when he abruptly married actress Marsha Mason some time after his first wife's death. Out of this painful period in his life. Simon has created a painfully effective portrait of human behavior at its most paradoxical: the man fears feeling happy, the woman's compassion threatens to kill her husband's affection. Chapter Two is a long way from the cute quarrels of the newlyweds in Barefoot in the Park. Simon's first...
...appeared most recently as Walter Matthau's brother in the movie California Suite--handles Leo's comic scenes with expertise, though he tends to rush through his serious speeches. Only Jerry Orbach is completely and consistently excellent, especially in his physical gestures. At one point, he strokes his dead wife's picture as tenderly as if he were touching the woman herself--then jerks his hand away to hide the private gesture from his brother. Whether indulging in outrageous facial clowning, or making his voice crack with pain, Orbach's performance is perfectly controlled...
...filmed. Vilmos Zsigmond is a genius. Well edited. Those weren't Pennsylvania mountains, though. Man, it was elaborately bogus--the choral music in the mountains, the Russian Orthodox Church that looked like the Vatican--and those scenes in the beginning...During my youth, after an unpleasant incident with the wife of the Marquis De Palona--from which comes the English, "marquee," which applies to movies--I was forced to take a sojourn along the Ohio, and I was struck by how true-to-life the scenes in the steel mills are. Those people, though, do not sound like steel workers...