Fools ran barely a month on Broadway, probably the least successful of Neil Simon’s plays. It followed the string of hits which made him the king of the Great White Way for a time from the late 1960s that seemed likely to go on forever. According to Broadway rumor, now legend, perhaps started by an actor Simon didn’t cast, in his divorce from his second wife Simon promised her the profits of his next play. How could she lose? Did Simon attempt to write something that would never last on Broadway? With some affection for Simon, the New York Times reviewer Frank Rich wrote of Fools and its top-drawer theatre talent, “As one watches Mr. Simon, the director Mike Nichols and a topflight cast struggle to puff up this show, a feeling of unreality sets in. It’s as if a team of brilliant high-priced surgeons has been assembled to operate on a splinter. While Mr. Simon has come up with a few funny moments, there are only so many jokes that anyone can make about stupidity. Once we learn that the town peddler sells flowers as whitefish, that the town doctor can’t read his own eye chart and that the town shepherd can’t find his sheep, there’s an inevitability about every punch line.”
Despite all that, Fools has twice been adapted as a musical – by fools? — with minimal success. But theatres across America have taken a liking to Simon’s Fools, especially community theatre. I think I have seen it at least three times in St. Louis; now, with the current KTK Theatre production, perhaps four.
Fools is a variant of the story of a village of stupid people, a story that exists in some form in most traditions. In Simon’s play, the stupidity results from a 200-year-old curse cast on the town by an ancestor of Count Gregor Yousekevitch, the ruler of the district. Simon gets his laughs from the townspeople’s non sequiturs, malapropisms, and other twisted meanings and logic.
Leon Tolchinsky, a young schoolteacher from Moscow, has been hired by the town doctor to teach the doctor’s daughter. Tolchinsky soon discovers that this would be an impossible task. It would be equally impossible to teach anyone in the village, including the doctor. They are all equally, imperviously stupid. But Tolchinsky falls in love with the doctor’s daughter. And he discovers that one of the things the stupid people of Kulyenchikov don’t know is how to love. He determines to break the curse. But he also learns that if he stays in Kulyenchikov for more than 24 hours, he too will fall victim to the curse. Must he give up his intelligence for love? Perhaps he wouldn’t be the first.
The play has a kind of sweetness about it. We laugh at these people, but we also pity them. They are victims, and they are not mean in their stupidity. Even the villain of the piece, Count Gregor, wants to be loved by the audience – he, like schoolteacher Tolchinsky, sometimes addresses the audience directly.
Tolchinsky declares that he is enthusiastic about teaching. As played by Michael Doliner at KTK Productions, Tolchinsky is enthusiastic about everything. Each statement is proclaimed, each gesture is grand. It makes a nice contrast with the quiet, hesitant people of the town. And, though not a fool like the townspeople, he can be a foolish young man in love. Doliner keeps the extravagance mostly under control, and he gets the laughs and our affection.
As do all the cast, with most getting an opportunity to display fine physical comedy.
As Dr. Zubritsky, Matthew Garrison makes good use of slow takes, allowing for others to display the admiration and respect owed to the intelligence and skill of a doctor, if not owed to his intelligence and skill. As his wife Lenya, Amie Bossi supports his opinion of himself and is given by costume designers Amanda Toye and Marie Moore fancier clothes with attractive Russian decorative touches than the plain dull clothes of the others. Though Jack Connors, as the town’s Magistrate and timid town crier, does get a somewhat official-looking near-uniform. In Amanda Toye, the charming young woman shines through the curse of foolishness on the doctor’s daughter Sophia, sought after both by our hero Tolchinsky and our villain Count Cregor. Arriving in Kulyenchikov,Tolchinsky first encounters the town’s foolishness in the person of the befuddled shepherd Snetsky “The Sheep-Loser,” played by Dave DeRose. Mike Maskus plays Mishkin the village’s postmaster, forever throwing his satchel of mail in the butcher’s shop next door; Jim Wamser is Slovitch, the animal-loving butcher; and Melissa Schlueter plays the sweet – and maybe a little flirtatious – vendor who never knows what she is vending. Tom Kessinger’s mean Count Gregor, descendant of the count who called down the curse, is just villainous enough to maintain some suspense but not able to out-trick Tolchinsky with his own dirty tricks.
Director Stephanie McCreary has done an admirable job of making the most of this second-rank Neil Simon and especially enriching it with physical comedy. The set by director McCreary and Joe McKenna splits the stage between the interior of the doctor’s house and the exterior of the village square. Chris O’Donovan’s lights keep things bright, as does Joe Moore’s sound design. Lucy Bowe is the Stage Manager and Deana LaRue the Assistant Director.
Thanks, KTK, for finding the laughter in the lesser of what Simon says.
—Bob Wilcox
Photo by Stephanie McCreary
