For decades I’ve bemoaned the newer theatrical practice of miking actors in non-musical roles. Why, I have whined, aren’t we still expecting actors to project?
The four players in the Arizona Theatre Company production of "Chapter Two" are not wired for sound. But boy, are they projecting.
I can’t imagine there’s anything questionable about the acoustics in the Herberger Theater Center’s mainstage, so why, on opening night, were all but one of these fine actors bellowing as if they were on fire? While I usually wind up wondering how I allowed myself to be talked into seeing another Neil Simon play, my question this time was: How come everyone’s screaming?
Despite all the hollering, let me recommend that you go see this production of "Chapter Two."
You likely won’t have another chance to watch a play directed by the woman who inspired it, one written by her ex-husband. This is Neil Simon’s turning-point play, the place where he reportedly discovered he could mine his personal life for comedy.
Actress Marsha Mason was married to Simon when he wrote "Chapter Two," which is a play about a recent widower who marries a long-suffering divorcee. She endured Simon’s lingering grief over the death of his first wife.
Here, she’s at the helm of her own story, which she has updated to some ill-defined recent time. The characters carry cell phones but also have land lines and answering machines. The lead character, a novelist, writes not on a typewriter but a suspiciously older-looking laptop.
Regardless of what era he’s suffering in, you’ll very much enjoy, I think, David Mason’s performance as George Schneider. Mason, who is no relation to Marsha Mason, is a charmer who offers a menu of emotions, each more sincere than the last. He’s an unabashed bumbler when meeting Jennie Malone, played by Blair Baker, over the telephone. He’s sweetly assertive when they hook up in person, and expertly comic in those unsubtle moments that hang like moss in every Neil Simon dramatic comedy.
The scene where George Schneider confesses his resentment of his new wife and the lingering pain of his late wife’s absence is breathtaking—it’s both cake and icing.
Robrt Pela’s reviews appear in the Phoenix New Times.