California Suite, Neil Simon’s comedy that sets four different short plays in one suite of the Beverly Hills Hotel in the 1970s, gets a workout the next three weekends in Morro Bay: By the Sea Productions is presenting the four playlets helmed by four different directors.
Nicolette Tempesta, Jonah Duhe, Topher Lyons, and Kira Dobson each get a crack at organizing their performers around Simon’s witty words—although they aren’t as clever (the quips, not the actors) as those in Simon’s earlier, similarly structured Plaza Suite.
Production manager Janice Peters has seen to it that each section is supported by sensible lighting, sound and costuming (kudos to Samvel Gottlieb, Bryan Easton, and Melissa Karas respectively). And the re-setting between scenes is cleverly designed to keep us entertained (thanks to stage managers Jean Miller and Rayna Ortiz, who add their own bit of performance magic to the proceedings).
The four playlets range from mostly dialogue (Nicki Butler and Brennan Stewart as a divorced couple in Scene 1) to a good bit of action (Elizabeth Bolyard, Frank Maciel, Whitney Adams and Chris Burnham as two couples vacationing together in Scene 4). Butler is confident in her banter with Stewart, who returns her verbal vollies as if they are actually an old married couple. Tempesta keeps their movements constrained, as if the walls of the hotel suite are small and about to close in on them.
Dobson’s cast opens up the suite in Scene 4, with the director giving his four performers free rein to rave and wrestle around the stage with each other as the couples come to the conclusion that perhaps sharing a lengthy vacation wasn’t a good idea. Maciel and Burnham have a ball with their hilarious facial expressions, with Bolyard and Adams providing comic backup.
In between are two scenes that couldn’t be more different from each other. Scene 2 also features Burnham in another very physical role—one that is more slapstick than in Scene 4. He’s a hung-over married man who wakes up next to a woman who is not his wife (Adams again, playing comatose very well) just as his wife (Andrea Bowers, slickly sliding from unperturbed to very perturbed) arrives. Duhe makes the most of the suite’s two-room-and-bath set-up to enhance Burnham’s ridiculous attempts to hide his marital infraction.
Scene 3, on the other hand, can best be described as sweet, owing much to Simon’s depiction of an aging British actress (a glowing Kate Kravets) who is getting ready with her husband (Stewart again, showing off his easy physical and verbal versatility) to attend the Academy Award ceremony where she has been nominated. Lyons deserves credit for giving the actors room to explore the mature part of this relationship with grace while letting their inner frustrations bubble to the surface as required by the script.
With California Suite as a four-in-one success, By the Sea Productions might want to showcase Simon’s Plaza Suite next—why not keep a good idea going?