‘Laughter on the 23rd Floor’ offers lots of fun at New Castle Playhouse

By Milan Paurich

The unofficial fourth installment of Neil Simon’s “Eugene Trilogy” that marked a series of autobiographical works about the “Barefoot in the Park”/”Odd Couple” playwright’s early life and career, “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” is as richly, ruefully nostalgic as it is funny.

In fact, the most surprising thing about the show is that Simon didn’t name his “23rd Floor” alter ego Eugene Jerome like he did in “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” “Biloxi Blues” and “Broadway Bound” (the plays that comprise the aforementioned “Trilogy” that stretched from 1983-86).

But make no mistake, “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” protagonist Lucas Brickman IS Eugene — or Simon — under a different name. And like Simon’s previous authorial stand-ins, Lucas is more observer than participant: someone who things happen “around” rather than “to.”

The challenge in any production of “23rd Floor” (or any of the “Trilogy” plays for that matter) is not to let the Simon personage get overshadowed and upstaged by his more colorful, and more vividly drawn, comic cohorts.

Westminster College junior David Lynch makes an affable enough Lucas in the New Castle Playhouse mounting that opened to an SRO crowd Friday night, but he has a tendency to recede into the background for much of the evening. At times, it’s a little hard to tell just whose story this really is.

Set against the heady backdrop of a “Your Show of Shows” — like the television program in 1953 — “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” is Simon’s witty valentine to TV’s golden age.

The camaraderie and affectionate bantering between the show’s writing staff is the centerpiece of the play, yet the figure that looms the largest, rightfully so, is the show-within-a-show’s star, Sid Caesar manqu Max Prince (a bravura John Cox). A raging egomaniac, alcoholic and junkie, as well as a bona fide comedy genius, Max does his best to make life a living hell for everyone around him: his writers, the network brass, his long-suffering (but never seen) wife and children. Max would be unbearable or worse if he weren’t so darn charming and preternaturally gifted.

During the course of the play, Max wages an (ultimately losing) battle with NBC to maintain creative autonomy. By the time the show ends, Simon has poignantly conveyed the passing of an era, and deftly recorded a beloved chapter in the annals of show business and television history.

Director Caryn Nicholson (who helmed NCP’s 2008 smash “Forever Plaid”) maintains a suitably antic pace throughout and gets uniformly strong performances from her enthusiastic cast.

Besides the indispensable Cox who delivers a real tour-de-force as larger-than-life hellion Max, other standouts include David Dougherty as thickly-accented Russian migr writer Val; Ben Solomon (Kenny, the de facto peacemaker on Max’s staff)); and Phillip L. Clark, Jr. (hypochondriacal joke machine Ira whose sincerest wish is to have a virus named after him).

Mary Ann Mangini, so memorable as Nellie Forbush in NCP’s terrific “South Pacific” last summer, is immensely winning in the underwritten role of office secretary Helen.

I just wish that the comely Mangini had been given a more period-appropriate look. She seems too 21st century by half.

The biggest problem with “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” is the same one that afflicted it when the show premiered on Broadway in 1993. The whole “early-days-of-television” milieu was already exhaustively covered a decade earlier in the Oscar-nominated screen comedy “My Favorite Year” (produced, not so coincidentally, by Mel Brooks, another member of the original “Your Show of Shows” writing staff), and Simon’s play inevitably feels a tad like an entertaining rehash.

X“Laughter on the 23rd Floor” runs through Feb. 1. at the New Castle Playhouse’s Annex Theater. For tickets and showtimes, call (724) 654-3437.