His beautifully shaped plays sing in the mouths of professionals, but amateurs can put them over. His craftsmanship, which almost never fails, hides depths. And people who'd find O'Neill too wordy or Pinter too obscure or Williams too stylized have gone to Neil Simon's comedies - they're all dubbed comedies, however sad the fate of some of the characters - and pondered the issues wrestled with by those acknowledged masters, served with humor.
Take "Biloxi Blues," the military play now getting a satisfying rendition at Theatre Charlotte. It deals with prostitution, madness, dehumanization, anti-Semitism and homosexuality in the U.S. Army during World War II. (It was written in 1985, a decade before the "don't ask, don't tell" plan.)
Yet these issues have been raised in ways that feel comfortable to even the most timid theatergoer. The reactions at Theatre Charlotte Thursday night were typical for one of Simon's more complicated plays: first broad belly laughter, then ruminative chuckles, then a quiet settling-in to give the ideas full attention, punctuated by knowing smiles.
"Blues" begins with shy Eugene Morris Jerome (Robert Crozier), a loose stand-in for Simon, en route to basic training in Biloxi, Miss., in 1943.
His barracks-mates include crude but dependable Wykowski (Jon-Claude Caton), amiably ignorant Selridge (Josh Looney), sensitive Carney (John Wray), pleasantly ambiguous Hennessey (Scott McCalmont) and Epstein (Colby Davis), Jerome's fellow Jew from New York, who's both the smartest and dumbest of the bunch - smartest because of his intellectual scope and dumbest because he has no idea how to accommodate Toomey (Lamar Wilson), their bellowing, intractable top sergeant.
Simon rarely writes complex female characters, and the two here are merely foils for Eugene. Genial hooker Rowena (Gayle Taggert) gives him his first orgasm, and bright Catholic schoolgirl Daisy (Paula Schmitt) gives him his first declaration of love.
This is very much a play about men, and the process of learning to be men under the pressure of imminent deployment to battle. The six learn to cooperate despite disharmony and trust each other despite prejudice and suspicion. Toomey is a bogeyman who rages and inflicts punishments, but he's also the kind of noncom whose harsh treatment may be the sort of fire through which they must pass to mature.
Director Dave Blamy has been sensitive to detail: Watch the way Eugene crawls into bed with Rowena, eager and awkward and scared at once.
The actors work hard to provide the same kind of verisimilitude. The self-effacing Crozier makes an apt narrator, one who can drop a witticism or a pertinent comment and then let the more colorful characters take over. Davis, who looks rather like a younger David Letterman, could be more of a self-assertive know-all - that's why others dislike him, even more than his Jewishness - but his stubbornness is just right.
Wilson, so memorable as Frankenstein's creature in "Monster" at Carolina Actors Studio Theatre, plays another kind of sensitive monster here, roaring outside but hurting inside. He doesn't show the hint of insanity that William Sadler had on Broadway and Christopher Walken brought to the film, but every other aspect of his performance is right, including the touch of sadness.
So there's a ring of truth in the direction, delivery and dialogue. This play is commonly thought to be autobiography, but Simon was in high school in 1943. He didn't serve in the Army until the war was over, and he imagined 40 years afterward what these men must have felt. That he did this so well, giving these characters' lines that resonate at any level of good theater, is an achievement not to be taken lightly.
