୮ In Review

'California Suite' is alive with humor and pathos

AKRON

By Bill Doll

Theater critic

Of course Neil Simon's "Califor-

nia Suite" at Kenley's Thomas Hall home is funny. It's loaded with so many laughs, it's like watching a big-league pitcher at the top of his form mixing them up, firing them in and rarely missing the strike zone.

But the joy of "California Suite" is that it's more than Simon hurling laughs. Here the humor emerges from real people, complex humans, struggling through real, sometimes poignant, problems.

To add to the pleasure, Brenda Vaccaro and James Farentino turn in well rehearsed, solid performances. Such performances are no mean feats in the hasty world of summer theater. It's the difference between dining off china and eating off elarnac.

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There is one disappointment in the performancés. But whether this should be debited to the accounts of Ms. Vaccaro and Farentino, who (with one mute exception) are the entire cast, or to the director, a fellow with the wonderfully Hollywood name of Stockton Briggle, is hard to say. More on this in a moment.

The evening is three of the four one-act sketches Simon wrote about different guests in the same suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

In the first, Ms. Vaccaro is a tough-talking New York magazine editor in Los Angeles to meet with her ex-husband about with which of them their teen-aged daughter should live.

For Ms. Vaccaro's editor, conversation is a furious tennis match of snide remarks and smart-

alecky put-downs. She revels in the battle, sneering at her ex's California casual tennis shoes and no tie. She doesn't ask questions, he says, she throws spears.

Farentino is low-key, at ease, a man who has gladly escaped her world of verbal pneumatic drilling. Slowly she drives him back to banter, but never thoroughly. It's a poignant picture of two different ends of America. Yet Vaccaro's editor, "throwing bric-a-bats so fast she doesn't have time for an honest emotion," is never the mother a little bit fearful of losing her daughter that she should be.

It is as if Ms. Vaccaro (or, I suspect, Briggle, the director) cheated Simon and us by letting the comedy override the characters.

Such is not the problem in the second act about a British actress up for an Oscar in town for the awards with her husband, an antique dealer.

Simon has a fine time laying out the foolishness and rituals of Hollywood. And Ms. Vaccaro and Farentino do a fine turn of being trapped in a marriage where they civilly pick at each other because he is homosexual and she cannot be fully a woman because of it. It's the best act, and a darn good one.

If the first two are tender fun, the third is pure farce. A very domesticated husband wakes up in the suite to find a prostitute, a gift from his brother, dead drunk asleep in bed. His wife is on her way up in the elevator.

Sure, "California Suite" is funny. But the laughs have a bonus and that may make this comedy one of the better things to pass our way this summer.

· Brenda Vaccaro