Cliff Dwellers' Purgatory

By T.E. Kalem

New Yorkers are disaster-prone, and they rather relish it. Muggings, burglaries, strikes and technological failures of all kinds form part of the daily news fare. A New Yorker would count the day lost if he could not regale an out-of-towner, or a friend, or himself, with some vivid tale of megalopolitan woe. The past master of this urban gallows humor is Neil Simon, and in The Prisoner of Second Avenue he has written his finest play since The Odd Couple.

As always with Simon, this is a situation comedy. Mel (Peter Falk) is a 47-year-old Manhattan executive. His corporate ship is sailing the rough seas of red ink, and members of the staff are being thrown overboard. In Act I, Mel has reached the fingernail-nibbling stage. Will he go next? Equally worried colleagues arrive at the office shortly after daybreak: "They're afraid if you get there late," Mel explains, "they'll sell your desk."

Visiting Locusts. In Act II, Mel has not only been fired, but his unanticipated severance pay is a nervous breakdown. His wife Edna (Lee Grant) goes to work, and that bruises his pride further. His psychoanalyst has died, taking $23,000 of Mel's money with him. He has a visitation of locusts--his two sisters, a sister-in-law and his older brother Harry (Vincent Gardenia)--who tell him that the family is determined to provide "X-number of dollars" to assist him. The attempt to agree on what X-number of dollars is in cash supplies the evening with one of its comic apexes.

By itself, that modest plot cannot fully convey the quinine-flavored humor of the evening. Simon creates an atmosphere of casual cataclysm, an everyday urban purgatory of copelessness from which laughter seems to be released like vapor escaping from the city's manholes.

The setting sets the mood. Richard Sylbert has devised a marvelous high-rise apartment in full view of--what else?--another highrise. The rent is just as steep, but the fixtures are gimcrack, the partitions are parchment, and the terrace looks like a handy suicide perch. The acoustics are superb. Says a sleepless Mel: "Two-thirty in the morning. I can hear the subway in here better than I can hear it in the subway."

Righteous Lard. A line like that never sounds like a howler on paper, but in the theater it brings the house to a roar. Which is a tribute to the palpable miracles of timing and inflection that a director like Mike Nichols and an actor like Peter Falk can produce out of their sheer unfaltering professionalism. Falk is perfectly cast. He has just the right sag to the shoulders and a face that a mirror would wince at in the morning. Lee Grant is tart, perky and warmly sympathetic. Vincent Gardenia is a pillar of righteous, lard and quivers hysterically when he thinks of all the love that was denied him and lavished upon Mel when they were boys.

By putting some fun about Fun City into Fun City, Neil Simon lavishes love on all of the harried cliff dwellers.

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