Neil Simon’s rarely revived The Prisoner of Second Avenue is the darkest of all his comedies, bar none. So many misfortunes befall hapless adman Mel Edison that he feels like an anticipation of the Joe Benjamin character in the playwright’s God’s Favorite, Simon’s comic take on The Book of Job, written a few years later. Snip out the frequent laughter in Prisoner, running through March 1 at Appleseed Productions, and you’re left with a rough draft of Death of a Salesman set in midtown Manhattan. The secret is that the prisoner of the title does not rage against his fate or even bitch. What he does is kvetch, a Yiddish word implying complaint with a sense of absurdity in it all.
Prisoner is set at the time of its opening, 1971, when many New Yorkers felt they were trapped in a mini-apocalypse. Director Tina Lee reminds us of the date by running a track of All in the Family’s Archie and Edith Bunker warbling “Those Were the Days.” Mel (played by Robb Sharpe) observes, “This is the most crime-ridden city in the history of the world.” True, civility on the street had receded from those halcyon days at the end of World War II, a problem that has since been addressed by decades of well-planned policing.
At the time, though, the threat led to a kind of malaise that perceived everything as breaking down, from the economy to elevators. About the same time cartoonist Jules Feiffer wrote Little Murders, an even darker, less funny comedy that has not endured as well. A chief difference is that while Feiffer’s real subject is fear, Simon is actually focusing on family.
Mel begins in discomfort. He awakes in the middle of the night, yes, kvetching. While trying to sleep in his 14th-floor apartment at 88th Street and Second Avenue on the Upper East Side, he’s too hot. It’s July 23. When he gets out of bed, he’s too cold. The air conditioning is hyper-efficient. Next door two Lufthansa air hostesses are entertaining loud, libidinous gents from around the world. The harsh sounds of sirens and barking dogs float up the complete 14 floors to assault his ears. Everything in his milieu, including the cushions on his expensive couches, is an affront to his comfort.
We learn a bit later that Mel’s irritability is triggered in part by his having lost his job and not wanting to admit it to his wife Edna (Aileen Kenneson). Out on the street at age 47, but it’s not his fault, just a purge that wiped out the staff en masse. Not that Mel has anything to fear from Edna, who’s most reasonable and accommodating. Simon may have based Edna on his much-loved first wife Joan, then still in good health. By denying Edna comic lines, there’s no Punch-and-Judy butting of heads, which also means that Sharpe’s Mel has to engender most of the comedy on his own, which he does. Simon, instead, is saving Edna for bigger things.
What really drives Mel to the edge, and then off it, is staying home while Edna goes back to work to keep the household running. The paranoia pouring forth from talk radio, even before the advent of the right-wing blowhards, is more than Mel’s slender sanity can bear. He plunges into a nervous breakdown, at which time Edna calls in Mel’s family to see what can be done.
