The problem of evil in Neil Simon’s plays — and in a string of American comedies long before the Bankable One — can be stated in three words: there isn’t any. Shakespeare’s comedies, from Two Gentlemen onwards, are teeming with wickedness and villainy, growing so virulent by the late stages of his career that a few of the works once collected as comedies are now referred to politely as “problem plays.”
American movies and animated cartoons have always valued the villain as a prime ingredient in comedy, but our stage has had a curious predilection for eccentricity. When Simon wrote Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple, he was carrying a torch passed along to him by such Broadway hit-makers as Jean Kerr, Philip Barry, Moss Hart, and George S. Kaufman — and such Broadway hits as Harvey, Life With Father, and Arsenic and Old Lace.
Rich Orloff knows the tradition well. Veronica’s Position, winner of CL‘s Best Comedy award in 1995, obviously descends from The Royal Family by Kaufman and Edna Ferber, with the Barrymores of old replaced by the Liz & Dick circus. Barbs tossed back and forth by the Taylor and Burton alter egos have the snap of Simon’s famed one-liners, tipped with a little more venom.
Evil is more palpable in Big Boys, currently in its Southeast regional premiere at Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte. CEO egomaniac Victor Burlington puts a naïve, pitifully scrupulous applicant, Norm Waterbury, through a humiliating interview hell and hires him for his pains. Victor saddles Norm with impossible projects on impossibler deadlines, hamstrings his efforts, and demolishes his love life. Norm learns the lesson of Victor’s perverse tyranny — he needs to be meaner, tougher — so he asks the boss to mentor him in the fine art of being an asshole. Knowing the task will be epic, Victor embarks with the appropriate millennial quote from Tony Kushner.
As Victor, Jerry Colbert is delightfully at odds with the urbane romantic leads he usually plays, capable of volcanic eruptions of rage, impish mischief, and perpetual caprice. Joe Rux is the perfect comedy foil for Victor’s maniacal antics in this two-hander, yielding meekly to his boss with enough hesitation — and a golden thread of integrity — to make his development plausible and consistent with his ambition.
But there’s a reason why this comedy about a corporate cutthroat written in 1997, before the dot-com bubble or the Bush bailouts, can seem timely today. If Orloff parts company with Simon in his willingness to put a crooked tyrant onstage, he is no more ready to embrace specificity. Whatever Burlington manufactures or deals in remains undisclosed. Victims of Victor’s greed and vanquished competitors never appear, and this comedy is a brand-name-free zone, detached from history, Wall Street, and Main Street.
Rising occasionally to heights of hilarity, Big Boys remains a little WWF-ish in its theme: the naïf can only become championship material if he can reconcile himself to breaking rules and agreements. Still, the onus is on Orloff to keep the laughs coming when relevance isn’t. That’s why his detour into a word-game interlude smacking of Victor Borge is so disastrous. Not only does it halt the laugh momentum, it reminds us that little else has been keenly to the point.
Colbert and Rux, egged toward excess by director Chip Decker, add extra sparkle to the script and extra physicality to the Victor/Norm power struggle. You won’t come out of Actor’s Theatre any wiser, but the co-stars will give you a good time and win your admiration.
This article appears in Sep 29 – Oct 6, 2009.
