MORRISBURG – Sometimes love means never having to say you’re sorry – especially if you live at the top of five flights of narrow stairs in a cramped little apartment that leaks!
And if newlyweds Paul and Corie seem to be polar opposites at coping with those little realities that flavour married life, well, that’s where the laughter starts.
Neil Simon’s award-winning classic comedy, Barefoot in the Park, looks at the difference between falling in love and being in love.
In this really delightful Playhouse season opener, directed by Donnie Bowes, the audience is invited to share Paul and Corie’s bumpy journey to understanding.
The route is packed with warmth and lots of laughter.
Melissa Morris portrays Corie as lovably free-spirited and exuberant, always ready to take big bites out of life.
Ephraim Ellis winningly captures fledgling lawyer Paul’s buttoned down, conservative desperation to achieve his share of the American Dream.
Opposites definitely attracted during their courtship.
But can such opposites make things work in the “real world”?
Especially if the “real world” is a cramped, cold, little apartment in New York?
For Corie, living in the tiny walk-up brownstone attic is always a grand and thrilling adventure.
For Paul, however, it means an ice cold radiator, a missing bathtub, a broken skylight in January, and five interminable flights of stairs (if you don’t count the stoop!)
No doubt about it.
This apartment will test them.
It is also the entry point for the people who become a big part of Corie and Paul’s world.
Affectionately portrayed by veteran actor Linda Goranson, Corie’s widowed mother, Ethel, simply steals the audience’s heart.
From her first observation, (looking around the bare apartment), “I remember when you were a little girl, you said you wanted to live on the moon. I didn’t think you meant it,” to her gasping statement, as she lay collapsed following a wild night in an Albanian restaurant, “I’m going home. I want to die in my own bed,” Goranson makes it impossible not to root for Ethel.
Raised in an earlier generation, where values and expectations were, in many ways, quite different, it is Ethel, nonetheless, who understands Corie and her son-in-law.
“In my entire life. I’ve never seen two people more in love than you and Paul.”
This does not, however, guarantee that Ethel is going to understand the other unexpected force in the young couple’s life: their inimitable, one floor down neighbour, Victor Valasco.
Flamboyantly played by Allan Price, Victor happily spends his life just one window ledge ahead of eviction.
Hints of a slightly murky past in no way diminish this character’s colourful spirits, or even slightly curtail his outrageous and hilarious flirting with both Corie and Ethel.
“I’m 68 years old, and a thoroughly nice fellow,” he proclaims, then proceeds to make himself a robust part of Corie and Paul’s lives.
For Paul and Corie, married life in the brownstone sometimes goes as steeply up and down as those five flights of stairs they have to climb every day.
Certainly, there are times when things are said, and things are done, that the characters regret.
Marriage, after all, may not always be a barefoot walk in the park. Neither should it become a colourless routine.
Perhaps, as a telephone repairman, charmingly played by John Dickhout, (unexpectedly caught up in a turbulent moment in Paul and Corie’s life), wisely puts it: “Phones break down now and then, but somehow they have a way of getting fixed…if you know what I mean.”
While this play remains firmly rooted in the late 1960s, it still resonates with today’s audiences
Neil Simon’s themes are ageless.
Falling in love is easy.
Being in love is challenging.
Upper Canada Playhouse’s production of Barefoot in the Park is a hugely entertaining comedy with a cast that is uniformly strong and winning.
The show runs until July 2.
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