The Sunshine Boys

The Guthrie never fails to inspire me. I'd seen Neil Simon's play before, over a decade ago as a high schooler while on a trip to New York with my family. I remembered laughing, remembered my father laughing, but beyond that I didn't remember much.

Shortly after the New York trip I was cast as Grandma Kurnitz in Simon's Lost in Yonkers, and in college I played Rowena (yes, the prostitute) in his Biloxi Blues. So, needless to say, Simon and I have a long, storied history of which I am very fond.  That should serve as a healthy caveat to my review, I suppose, as Simon can do little wrong in my eyes.  But it should also prove that I set fairly high expectations for the performance of his plays.  The dialogue is sharp, the jokes smart, and nothing kills those qualities faster than actors who lack chemistry.  Luckily, Peter Michael Goetz and Raye Birk, along with the rest of the fine cast, delivered perfect timing and the sweet-and-sour camaraderie one expects from Simon's ornery duo.

Goetz filled Willie Clark with a feisty, almost-angry demeanor but tempered him with the slowness of age and the sadness of self-awareness as Clark slowly grasps that his acting days are finished. Birk countered this persona with his Al Lewis, a man more comfortable with retirement but also burdened by the guilt of having departed his friend and his stage.  The magic of the back-and-forth of their aged vaudeville performance is provided in snippets of their famous Doctor act but also in the one-upmanship of their arguments in Willie's apartment.  It's easy to imagine how great they once were, and easy to nod sadly at the inevitable snatching away of greatness by Time.

As fantastic as Goetz and Birk were, Greta Oglesby's sharp-tongued Registered Nurse was one of the highlights.  Having been awed by her performances in The Amen Corner and The Burial at Thebes, Oglesby is fast becoming one of my favorite Minneapolis actresses. She has an ease of movement that feels natural and nearly relaxed, but her words are sharp and her characters respond with a quickness that one would expect from reality.  There's no forcing of words or "over acting" (I kinda hate that term) in Oglesby's work, but there's a volume that fits her stature and the demeanor of her characters.  Other women might craft a Nurse that is a mere caricature of the sharp-witted caretaker, but Oglesby's Nurse exists, she walks down the street, she eats too much candy, she is exhausted by her patient, and she wants to see him get well. She feels real in a way Simon, I think, would have intended.

The Sunshine Boys is playing at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis July 7- September 2.  Don't forget to take advantage of Rush tickets, available for half price after 7pm most evenings.