Plaza Suite
Hudson Theatre, New York City ★★★★
Plaza Suite goes down “like a plate of cream puffs laced with cyanide,” said Alexis Soloski in The Guardian. Neil Simon’s
1968 comedy, now revived for Broadway by Tony winner John Benjamin Hickey, binds together three loosely affiliated oneacts that take place in one Manhattan hotel room. Taken collectively, this trio of plays presents a referendum on modern marriage, and the votes “have a lot more nays than ayes.” Simon doesn’t seem to like women very much—nor, for that matter, men. The “first and most substantive” story follows Karen and Sam, a long-married couple purportedly celebrating their anniversary while Sam grumpily preoccupies himself with work and, possibly, a dalliance with his secretary. The second, which is “flimsier and also overlong,” introduces Jesse, a highpowered Hollywood producer who invites an old high school girlfriend to the suite with plans to seduce her. The final, “and perhaps the most farcical,” centers on a married couple trying to coax their anxious daughter out of the bathroom on her wedding day. The chances of any of these troubled couples finding happiness together? “Slim to none.”
This unconventional play can be “a hard needle to thread,” so thank goodness for Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, said Daniel D’Addario in Variety. Parker and Broderick, a real-life couple who married in 1997, star in all three acts and “stand out among 21stcentury stars in their ability to conjure the Neil Simon sensibility.” While the couple’s “unmistakable chemistry” casts off some “metatextual sparks” that will delight the celebrity voyeurs in the audience, they also contribute “a shared willingness to dig into the work.” As Parker and Broderick embrace these difficult characters, with era-appropriate costumes and attitudes, set designer John Lee Beatty’s re-creation of a glamorous mid-century hotel room “can alternately seem like an indulgent treat or like a well-upholstered prison cell.” Plaza Suite remains as “uneven” now as it was in 1968, but this production is “about as successful as one could hope for.”
“Alas, the stars’ efforts, while certainly appealing, don’t make the material any less obsolete,” said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. Hickey has staged this “cute but shallow” revival as “a throwback to the bougie boulevard comedies that were once a Broadway staple.” By now though, Simon’s ’60s-era observations about marriage have come to feel “stale,” and the sexual politics are “retrograde.” With material this dated, the play’s laughs “mostly spring from watching a real-life showbiz couple kick back and have fun bouncing off each other. Judging by the hearty response at a recent press night, for many that might be reward enough.”