Simon Plays Promises Plenty Of ‘Laughter’

Neil Simon’s comedy “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” is too fresh from Broadway for most of us in the hinterlands to have seen it.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t know what to expect.

Anyone who remembers “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and “My Favorite Year,” starring Peter O’Toole, already has an idea what “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” is all about. These three comedies share the same setting and the same comic inspiration: the writer’s room at Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” and “Caesar’s Hour” in the 1950s.

Nowhere has there been such a collection of precocious comic talents: Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart, Woody Allen, Selma Diamond and Carl Reiner, who mythologizeed the experience in “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”

Oh, and there was one other writer in that room. Neil Simon.

Simon was an important part of that ensemble, and now with this play he delivers his own one-liner-filled memoir of one of the most remarkable periods in American comedy. The names have been changed: Caesar becomes Max Prince, Brooks becomes Ira, Diamond becomes Carol, and Gelbart and Reiner have been combined into the character of Kenny. Simon himself seems to be a narrator, Lucas.

“It’s not a documentary, it’s an impressionistic comedy,” Simon told the New York Times at the play’s opening.

Yet clearly this play is intended as a fond reminiscence of that time. Simon apparently remembers it very much the way Reiner remembered it, as a non-stop comic festival of one-upmanship.

“Essentially, the play is a series of can-you-top-this kaffeeklatsches for Max’s long-suffering writers, periodically interrupted by the welcome disruptive appearances of the great man himself,” wrote Frank Rich in his New York Times review.

Rich called the show “amiable and noisy,” but he also said that it doesn’t compare with such Simon classics as “The Sunshine Boys” or “The Odd Couple.” He said Simon’s numerous one-liners have a “higher strikeout rate than is typical for Mr. Simon at full tilt.”

The original Broadway cast featured Nathan Lane as Max Prince, Ron Orbach as Ira and Mark Linn-Baker as Val.

The Interplayers production features Michael Weaver as Max, Gary Pierce as Ira and William Marlowe as Val. The rest of the cast includes Bobbi Kotula, Yaakov Sullivan, R. Marquam Krantz, Leslie Gray Krantz, Jonn Jorgensen and Tom Willmorth.

Interplayers co-founder Robert Welch directs this, his first show since last year’s heart attack.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: THEATER The Interplayers Ensemble will present “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” Friday through May 11 at 174 S. Howard. Showtimes are 8 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, 7:30 p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays and 2 p.m. matinees on April 20, 24 and 27. Call 455-PLAY