Laugh on track

Simon goes behind the scenes of Your Show of Shows

by Steve Vineberg

LAUGHTER ON THE 23RD FLOOR By Neil Simon. Directed by Doug Ingalls. Costumes designed by Ellen Cornely. Lighting by Eric L'Ecuyer. With Bruce Adams, Matt Carr, Joe Arsenault, Robert Eiland, Mark Patrick, Connie Budish, Mark Siagh, and Robbin Joyce. At Stageloft Repertory Theater, Sturbridge, through November 1.

Years before he became a Broadway playwright, Neil Simon (along with his brother Danny) was a junior member of the writing team for Sid Caesar's phenomenal TV revue series Your Show of Shows, which ran from 1950 to 1954. (Simon joined the staff in the penultimate season.) The writers, a powerhouse band of lunatics that included Mel Brooks, Mel Tolkin, Lucille Kallen, Tony Webster, Joseph Stein, Caesar himself and his producer Max Leibman, and later Carl Reiner, Woody Allen, and Larry Gelbart, created some of the funniest sketches television audiences have ever seen, like the often anthologized one where Caesar and his costar Imogene Coca parody the love scene on the beach in From Here to Eternity and a burlesque of This Is Your Life that climaxes with the diminutive Howard Morris, the Titan-sized Caesar's favorite sidekick, clinging to his pant leg like a lovestruck mosquito.

Simon's play Laughter on the 23rd Floor isn't the first time the antics behind the scenes of Your Show of Shows have provided the source for a comedy. Richard Benjamin's 1981 movie My Favorite Year (with Joe Bologna, memorably outrageous, as a fictionalized version of Caesar) focused on the efforts of a young writer who had to babysit a guest star (Peter O'Toole, sending up Errol Flynn) and keep him out of trouble. I don't think Simon's play is as good as My Favorite Year -- dramatically, it lacks drive, and the second half of the second act dwindles away to nothing. But it's happily free of the nagging self-pity at the heart of most later Simon plays (Laughter on the 23rd Floor was written maybe half a decade ago), and it's powered by the characters, a prize collection of fruitcakes whose jokemaking is a weirdly gifted form of obsessiveness. I had a better time watching Laughter on the 23rd Floor in Doug Ingalls's rowdy production at Stageloft than I have at any other Simon play (except perhaps his farce Rumors).

At the beginning of act one I started jotting down notes in my program so I could distinguish the names of the nine characters (especially the seven men), but I soon realized it was hardly necessary. Ingalls and his cast take obvious joy in delineating the individual idiosyncrasies of each character, and the names lingered in my head afterwards. Matt Carr is Milt, who arrives at work each day decked out in a different elaborately idiotic outfit (Ellen Cornely did a fine job dreaming up preposterous combinations for him) and who cheats on his wife with the same merry, what-the-hell fatalism that seems to guide his attitude toward writing for the show. Jeremy Woloski is Brian, the only gentile on the staff, a burly Irishman with a cougher's hack (though, oddly, in this production we never seem him with a butt in his mouth) and a much-repeated vow to leave New York and make it in Hollywood. Mark Patrick is the bearded, gargantuan Ira, who staggers into the office -- late -- every morning complaining of a new life-threatening disease; he and Brian are forever at each other's throats. Connie Budish is Carol, the only woman on the team, who spends the first half of the second act (miserably) pregnant but prides herself on being one of the guys (which means cursing as inventively as any of the men). Robert Eiland is the sanest one, Kenny, who wears a look of permanent disgust.

These five actors all do splendid work, and Joe Arsenault, as the head writer, Val, a transplanted Russian, is really marvelous. (He has a wonderfully pliable body for comedy.) Bruce Adams plays Max Prince, this play's stand-in for Sid Caesar, with a bizarre distractedness that takes some getting used to -- or perhaps on opening night it just took him a while to hit his stride. But he gives a risky, physically daring performance, and the risks pay off; when I got home after the show, I realized I could remember in detail every single one of his routines. Robbin Joyce plays the secretary, Helen, who has a secret longing to be a comedy writer; it's not much of a part. And Mark Siagh gets stuck with the Neil Simon character, Lucas, the new kid on the scene, whose reminiscences the play dramatizes. Siagh is a trifle dull, but he can't be blamed: Simon doesn't think up a single ridiculous thing for him to do (we hear about one after it's happened, which isn't adequate) -- he doesn't even write him a single laugh line. Framing the comedy as a memoir was a bad idea, anyway, because a narrator is always a normative character, and what would a normative character be doing writing for Your Show of Shows? That's one of the ways in which Laughter on the 23rd Floor shows itself to be a little wobbly. But you'll probably be enjoying yourself too much to notice.