Sadly, the third act demonstrates that after a gap, opportunities for this type of humour tend to dry up. The Hubleys’ daughter Mimsey has locked herself in the toilet before her upcoming wedding, and her parents, Roy and Norma, are at their wits’ end trying to coax her out. For more information reading below.
Norma (Parker) stands simpering, disputing, and enjoying Roy as he plays a near-violent joke on her (Roy; Broderick; trying to smoke her; yelling through the keyhole; being a battering ram).
Review: In ‘Plaza Suite,’ the Ghosts of #MeToo Haunt the Halls
The joke, not a bad one, is that in their response to Mimsey’s worry about marriage, Hubley’s bickering demonstrates exactly what scares him. Will she and Borden, her fiancé, end up fighting like her parents?
Despite what Simon believes, the issue he dramatises is not marriage but rather his men. The joke of the acts, in which we experience a sour taste of the peremptory Borden, only accidentally emphasises this point.
It’s possible to view The Odd Couple, Neil Simon’s comedy from 1965, as a compendium of male chess in mid-century America, despite the fact that its two female characters are featherheads.
In any event, this is not what the current production gives. Instead, he seems to be banking on us being able to laugh off our troubled history by simply shrugging and saying, “That’s how it happened.”
Last Words
But that wasn’t how things were, it’s just how Simon viewed them, at least until he started allowing women intelligence and agency a decade more.
later, in chapter two. Despite their potential, his Plaza Suite gags keep withering away as we watch. Such an unequal war of the sexes is too far in the past to be hilarious now. Thanks for reading our article Review: In ‘Plaza Suite,’ the Ghosts of #MeToo Haunt the Halls.
