‘Red Hot Lovers’ has cooled in 40 years
GLOUCESTER - Neil Simon’s “Last of the Red Hot Lovers’’ is 40 years old. Its protagonist, Barney, a married man who’s longed to have an affair for years but has never quite dared to, is 52. Neither the play nor the character is aging particularly well.
Oh, Barney’s doing all right, for a guy who’s spent his life running a Manhattan seafood restaurant and raising a family with his dull but decent wife. But now he wants . . . he wants . . . more. He wants to see what sex would be like with another woman. He wants adventure. He wants romance.
So, naturally, he sneaks into his mother’s cramped East Side apartment, with its plastic slipcovers and its faded photographs, and tries to use it as a love nest. But, having given Barney these familiar longings and this familiarly comic setup, Simon then gives him three even more familiar, and more dismally unfunny, female puppets to play around with.
Gloucester Stage puts a spin on this tired piece by having one actress, the wonderful Karen MacDonald, play all three women - hardened adulteress Elaine, hippie chanteuse Bobbi, and best-friend’s-wife Jeanette - opposite the amusingly schlumpy Ken Baltin as Barney. The two of them use all of their considerable gifts to breathe life into their characters, and they find moments of real comic joy in each of the play’s three acts. But the joy is fleeting, because the play itself is just too old, too stale, and too dated in its approach to men and women to feel like a real comedy of human life.
The main problem is that, as one woman sitting nearby whispered to her companion, “It’s all about him.’’ Indeed it is: We are meant to sympathize with poor constricted Barney, to root for him as he flails around trying to find a breath of fresh air in his claustrophobic life (and the equally claustrophobic apartment, cleverly realized by set designer Eric Levenson), to side with him when he finds Elaine too cold, Bobbi too crazy, Jeanette too depressed.
But Simon stacks the deck so much in Barney’s favor that we start to get annoyed on behalf of the women. Barney, apparently, has a right to reinvent himself, to explore the sexual revolution, to be free; the women, meanwhile, exist only as fantasy figures - and disappointing fantasy figures at that - in his story. They’re props, not people.
MacDonald, being MacDonald, does find particular and precise ways of bringing the women to life: their voices, by turns hard or dreamy or droning; their eyes, hooded or wide or droopy; their every gesture, each revealing the specific personality of the woman who makes it. Frances Nelson McSherry’s costumes, along with Rachel Padula-Shufelt’s wigs and makeup, add further detail (and are also hilariously ’60s chic). But it’s ultimately dispiriting to watch a talented actress do so much with so little. Would it have killed Simon to give these women the tiniest hint of an inner life force of their own?
Maybe this sounds like too much weight to put on a comedy, and a ’60s sex comedy at that. But if the comedy just doesn’t seem that funny anymore, it leaves a person with too much time to start ruminating about what’s missing.
If you’re a middle-aged man who’s always wanted to have an affair, maybe “Last of the Red Hot Lovers’’ is still a hot ticket. For the rest of us, though, it’s hardly even lukewarm.
Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com. 