Moonstone Theatre Company begins its onstage life with Neil Simon’s Jake’s Women at the new Kirkwood Performing Arts Center. Among the amazingly prolific Simon’s plays – almost half his work was screenplays, which we tend to forget – this is one of the lesser-known.
Jake (Jeff Cummings) is a pretty successful writer, complete with a nice apartment in Manhattan and a beach house in the Hamptons. At the moment, he’s going through a rough patch, not quite the classic writer’s block but it’s a struggle to put the right words on the page. Writing, he says rather defensively, is fun. (Well sometimes. What’s really fun is having written. But who am I to argue with someone who made that much money from writing?) Right now, though, not so much.
One of the things he does to prime his intellectual pump is to have imaginary dialogues with the people in his life. His sister Karen (Sharon Hunter), for instance, or his therapist, Edith (Jennie Brick), seem to be the ones he talks to the most. In his head, of course. We, of course, see them.
Jake is married to Maggie (Jennifer Theby Quinn), a Midwesterner who’s seemingly rather younger than he. The marriage is on rocky ground as things crumble before our eyes. What now? Jake’s daughter Molly(Carly Uding as the college senior Molly, Amelie Lock as the 12-year-old Molly) is living with them, which complicates thing. Jake, you see, is a widower. Molly’s mother Julie (Marisa Puller) was killed in an accident, and she, too, is someone that appears in his thoughts.
These appearances are something he evokes deliberately – at first. As his distress at the marital problems increases, they seem increasingly to occur unbidden. Yes, it’s a Simon play, which means there are some funny lines. But there’s also serious distress here, including a scene that Cummings pulls off beautifully with a woman he’s dating (Mindy Shaw) and his estranged wife’s – well, at this point it doesn’t seem to be his imaginary dialogue with her as much as it is her ghost, even though she’s alive. Or perhaps it’s a true psychotic break. It could be seen either way, but it’s very well done on the part of all three.
Some very touching work, too, from Uding and Puller as the now-deceased mother and Jake’s evoked memory of their daughter as they meet in his memory despite his fighting against it.
It’s mostly not difficult to tell if each woman’s appearance on stage is the real person (except obviously for the late wife and the younger version of the daughter) or Memorex, to evoke a very old advertisement, but overall it’s not what one expects from Neil Simon, even under the expert eye of director Edward Coffield, an old hand with Simon scripts. Nevertheless, it’s skillfully acted, Dunsi Dai’s scenic design is nicely minimalist, and Michael Sullivan’s lights play on the memory concept very well. The music, particularly before the play opens, is perfect at evoking the time period.
Moonstone is welcomed to the St. Louis theatre community and long may they give us pleasure.
Jake’s Women
through November 21st
Moonstone Theatre Company
Kirkwood Performing Arts Center
210 E. Monroe, Kirkwood
314-821-9956
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