Bryan Cranston (Hal) ‘Chapter Two’ Reviews

"Chapter Two" has turned into a blacker comedy than it needs to be at Shadow Lawn Stage in West Long Branch.

Granted, this is Neil Simon's most complicated play, for it deals with death and disappointment. The famous line "Marry in haste, repent at leisure" here becomes "Remarry in haste, and repent almost immediately."

Give credit, though, to the four performers -- including Bryan Cranston (Hal in "Malcolm in the Middle") -- for making the laughs that do exist to fly over the footlights. All four, however, are sabotaged by set designer Fred Del Guercio and director John Burke -- though both men were probably undermined by a small budget.

Del Guercio hasn't designed a set, but is merely the show's interior decorator. All he's done is pick out pieces of furniture, and arrange them into two apartments -- one for recent widower, novelist George Schneider, and one for actress Jennie Malone, who's newly divorced. Behind them, Del Guercio hasn't created two distinct walls, but has simply dropped an enormous black curtain. That dark expanse imposes an additional heaviness.

Burke, though, is the bigger culprit, for thinking that each scene needs to end with a blackout. Considering that there are 18 scenes, the lights go out far too often. The audience sits in darkness for dozens of seconds, and waits ... and waits ... and waits. That short-circuits the play's flow.

Most directors who tackle "Chapter Two" prefer to keep the lights up when, say, George exits from his apartment to end a scene and Jennie comes into hers to begin one. While every now and then a technical worker needs to come on in darkness to deal with a significant prop, Burke still should have kept the blackouts to a minimum.

The chemistry is excellent among the four performers for good reason. Cranston (George) and Robin Dearden (Jennie) are married in real life. So are Bill Timoney, who plays George's brother Leo, and Georgette Reilly Timoney, who portrays Jennie's best friend Faye Medwick.

Cranston first wears the mask of tragedy as, at first, George mourns the loss of his beloved wife, cancer-victim Barbara, to whom he was blissfully married for 12 years. When a believable contrivance has him meet Jennie through an errant phone call, Cranston finally gets the chance to put on the mask of comedy. He knows how to play consternated, and can amusingly shrink in his skin when he makes a mistake. At playing benign neurosis, Cranston is a master comedian.

Dearden first plays the divorcee as the seen-it-all New Yorker, seeming as haughty as her impressively high cheekbones. She then displays a third-degree burn on her soul. Eventually she warms into such a nice person that, if George doesn't appreciate her, many men in the audience will yearn to take his place.

Simon made George and Jennie the "serious" couple, and Leo and Faye the "comic" one. Thus, the Timoneys have more fun. He has an astonishing sense of comic timing, and knows how to punch a punch line. She has a delicious pert quality that usually isn't seen in this role, but she makes it work wonderfully.

"Chapter Two" isn't the summer-by-the-sea comedy that audiences may desire on a hot night. Still, for those who always wondered what Hal in "Malcolm in the Middle" did for a living, here's one answer: Bryan Cranston is an accomplished stage performer who knows that having a strong cast around him makes him look even better.

BY PETER FILICHIA

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Solid cast does justice to Simon's "Chapter Two"

Benny or Local? If you're "Chapter Two" director John Burke, you're probably enjoying a singular opportunity to work with the best of both worlds.

As artistic director of the annual Shadow Lawn Summer Stage series of productions at Monmouth University, Burke has assembled casts that have featured a mix of Actors Equity professionals, community-stage commandos, Monmouth students and occasional characters who appeared to have stumbled onto the set from the fire exit. Results have consequently ranged in quality from the transcendent to the train wreck.

With this revival of Neil Simon's 1977 comedy, the school's Music and Theatre Arts Department chair finally has a cast to die for — a quartet of players that includes a couple of Monmouth County's most versatile pros, along with a pair of talented "out-of-towners" from screens big and small. It's a production that's attracted special attention due to the participation of Bryan Cranston, the Emmy-nominated actor known to millions as Jerry's swinging dentist on "Seinfeld" — as well as, most memorably, family man Hal on the Fox series "Malcolm in the Middle."

In his role as the perennially frustrated, put-upon patriarch in that long-running sitcom, the stalwart character man checked his thespian dignity at the soundstage door and regularly tested the envelope of his considerable energies, going to sometimes superhuman lengths in the service of a sharply-written, creatively realized belly laugh. As the widowed novelist George Schneider in Simon's quasi-autobiographical play, Cranston is called upon to conjure a very different sort of character — a guy who doesn't always wear his heart on his sleeve, for whom the right words somehow always manage to be expressed in all the wrong ways.

Keeping a low profile in the early scenes, and gradually dipping into his toolbox of facial expressions and physical-comedy gifts, Cranston finds the requisite laughs in Doc Simon's dependably gag-infused script — without veering so far into shtick as to dilute the power of his more emotionally wrenching scenes toward the end of this play. It's a beautifully modulated performance, and a satisfying showcase for a skilled farceur who's always managed to invest even the silliest of projects with an enormous amount of heart and mind.

Any actor worth his paycheck should be expected to feign likability, of course, but in this production, Cranston finds himself in the company of friends — not least of whom is wife Robin Dearden, the veteran stage-screen actress who co-stars here as Jennie Malone, a recent divorcee who rebounds into a re-marriage as the second Mrs. Schneider. With the action flip-flopping from one Manhattan apartment to another over the course of nearly 20 brief blackout scenes, Cranston and Dearden are asked to telescope what seems like years of life experience into an impulsive whirlwind relationship that seems so doomed, yet so right at its core.

Alternately helping and hindering things are George's press-agent brother Leo and Jennie's best friend Faye, played by Shadow Lawn returnee Bill Timoney and his wife, Georgette Reilly Timoney. The Belmar residents are both cartoon-voice specialists and multifaceted artists in their own right; their presence here reinforces the very real sense of rapport among this company.

With the material secure in such good hands, the only problems with the production arise from the fact that it's being presented in the school's 700-seat Pollak Theatre, rather than the Summer Stage's usual home at the charming little Woods Playhouse, a facility that's currently undergoing some welcome renovations. With whole sections of the auditorium blocked off to ticket buyers, the Pollak makes an unfortunately cavernous setting for this intimately-scaled show.

In the not too distant future, when posterity is able to sort through the prodigious output of the prolific Neil Simon, "Chapter Two" may take its place as one of the popular playwright's deepest and most heartfelt works — this despite being ill-served by a 1979 film version that starred a miscast James Caan. Those who might think they're dealing with the umpteenth dessert-show production of "Last of the Red Hot Lovers" should grab the opportunity to see this often overlooked play, presented by a group of artists who have mined it for its full heartbreaking, knee-slapping potential.

Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 07/25/07

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