Branford | Legacy Theatre | Arts & Culture | Theater
Diane Sobolewski Photos.
If the Legacy Theatre is invested in producing plays with a clear lineage in the American theater, there’s a certain sense to why the organization would choose Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple. One can trace a direct line from inter-war British wit Noël Coward to Simon to the ’80s Larry Shue to today’s suburban theater darling Ken Ludwig. Many of these men fancied themselves the theatrical progeny of Oscar Wilde, the slyly subversive theatrical champion of the effete, the queer, and the truly odd.
But the true Wilde spirit is nowhere to be found in Simon’s oeuvre, due to the playwright’s apparent inability to understand a simple idea. There’s a very serious difference between loving men and hating women.
The play runs through Oct. 11 at the Legacy Theatre, located at 128 Thimble Islands Rd. in Branford. Tickets and more information are available here.
The Odd Couple, directed by Legacy Theatre Artistic Director Eric Santagata, opened at Legacy Theatre in Branford last Thursday. The play’s legacy is as an overproduced masterpiece of casual misogyny. Newly divorced Oscar Madison (Ben Pitts) hosts his poker buddies (Stephen Depasque, Neil Fuentes, Max Evans, and Dominic Paolillo). Some are deadbeat divorcés; others still suffer under the tyranny of the ol’ ball and chain.
In Oscar’s new Manhattan bachelor pad, furnished with trash and greige, the married men whine about the constant nagging. The divorced men complain about alimony and their (ex-)wives, bemoan their lost access to home-cooked meals, a tidy home, and a love they’ve been forced to realize was conditional.
There’s a line in the playbill, from Santagata and Managing Director Jeff Zeitlin, about how the goal of theater is to let us “see ourselves reflected on stage.” But sitting in a performance Saturday, I felt profoundly alienated.
The poker game is blissfully interrupted by the arrival of the distraught and possibly suicidal Felix Ungar (Erik Bloomquist, refreshingly weird), a mutual friend of the party whose wife has just left him. On a desperate impulse, Oscar invites Felix to move in with him and the two form the titular “odd couple.” Felix almost immediately assumes the role of the hysterical, hypochondriacal, harried housewife. He scolds, he overreacts, he throws tantrums, he makes demands. In short, he makes Oscar’s life hell, driving his pseudo-spouse to the breaking point.
Despite several key elements of the play’s conceit—a “marriage” between two men, a male-presenting individual who assumes so-called “feminine” social roles and behaviors—there’s very little that’s queer about the play. “Odd,” here, is not a euphemism. The Odd Couple condemns gender non-conformity, making it the butt of the joke. The moral that Oscar internalizes by the end is that divorce isn’t all that bad; the only thing worse than living with a woman is living with a man who acts like one.
Diane Sobolewski Photos.
While there are two types of men in the world of the play—men and men who act like women—there are also only two types of women. They are balls and chains who “cook, clean, and cry,” or brainless birds who’d laugh their heads off if they had them. The only women who appear in the play, the Pigeon sisters, Cecily and Gwendolyn (played by the admirably committed Penny Amara and Desi Amato), are dinner dates for the two men. The sisters belong to the latter category of women. That their first names are stolen from Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest fails to create a kinship where none exists.
Sometimes, the misogyny is more than casual: act three descends into a thinly veiled domestic abuse fantasy. The act begins with Oscar returning home to Felix’s nagging about tidiness and timeliness. In the Legacy production, he wears the simple, sleeveless tank top often referred to as a “wife-beater” (costumes by Jimmy Johansmeyer) and, when the conflict escalates, chases Felix around the apartment threatening him with a baseball bat.
Is this catharsis? Closure? A cleansing playing-out of all the violent impulses Oscar checked over 12 years of marriage? Watching the play, I remembered that Neil Simon was married five times to four different women and I wondered.
Legacy Theatre’s production values are high. The small, steeply-raked auditorium, which was restored in 2021, lends an immersive quality to the bleakly impersonal showroom-style unit set (set and lighting design by Jamie Burnett). But alas, the theater’s choice of an irredeemable script meant, at least to this reporter, that the craftsmanship supporting it counted for very little. Bloomquist, the only equity actor in the cast, redeemed the show somewhat by leaning into a very of Felix as uniquely neurotic, rather than conventionally effeminate.
Legacy Theatre’s marketing blurb seems eager to lean into this reading, calling Felix and Oscar’s arrangement a union of “the clean freak and the slob.” The gender roles and stereotypes in which the play traffics get nary a mention. This hesitancy on the part of the theater to champion the play and its troubling message with its whole heart is, in a way, encouraging. Perhaps Legacy Theatre will be moved to seriously reconsider what kind of legacy it wants to leave.
Neil Simon's The Odd Couple runs through Oct. 11 at the Legacy Theatre, located at 128 Thimble Islands Rd. in Branford. Tickets and more information are available here.