Princeton Summer Theater concludes its season with this Neil Simon play.
By: Stuart Duncan
By the time Neil Simon wrote The Star-Spangled Girl in 1966, he had a nice list of successful hits and awards behind him: Come Blow Your Horn, Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple and Sweet Charity, plus the book to the musical Little Me.
But The Star-Spangled Girl was not a hit. In fact, most critics agree it is Simon’s weakest script. Walter Kerr, reviewing for the Herald-Tribune, pretty much summed it up: "Neil Simon didn’t have an idea for a play this year, but he wrote it anyway."
The comedy is seldom staged, in part because there are so many other rollicking Simon plays around. But Princeton Summer Theater has opted to close its 2003 series with the piece and, in the process, prove all over again that Mr. Kerr was right.
The plot, thin as onion skin, involves roommates Andy and Norman, who have been struggling for years to survive in San Francisco while publishing an underground protest newspaper. Andy takes care of the business end stalling the creditors and acting as a punching bag for a voracious landlady who might just clamp down on the rent if provoked. Norman does the writing, changing names and writing styles with each article. Into their lives comes a gung-ho (if somewhat ditzy) girl who checks into the apartment downstairs. Her sole claim to fame is the Olympic swimming team, placing fifth, losing even to a girl from Turkey (where it is noted, there is no water).
Sophie tends to salute the American flag every minute, and her attitude clashes with that of Andy. But Norman goes ga-ga over her "smell." That’s it that’s the premise of the plot. PST director Jennifer Leahy and her cast MacAdam Smith as Andy, Ben Mains as Norman and Elizabeth Brown as Sophie apparently couldn’t find much in the characters to exploit, so they revert to terminal cases of "the cutesies."
Simon’s famous dialogue leaves him, so we laugh hardest at a series of sight gags Andy gently dabbing jars of Noxzema on a painful sunburn; Norman starting to type, then yanking the sheets from his machine; spilling a jarful of pennies on the floor; many supercilious smiles. There’s a pretty good fight scene, played mostly for laughs in the second act, but that’s a long time to wait.
Don’t blame the actors, don’t even blame the director. Simon himself shouldered the blame. In 1977 he wrote, "’Star-Spangled Girl’ is clearly and simply a failure as far as I am concerned. It’s the only play I ever wrote when I did not have a clear visual image of the characters in my mind as I sat down at the typewriter."
The Star-Spangled Girl continues at the Hamilton Murray Theater, Murray-Dodge Hall, Princeton University, through Aug. 17. Performances: Thurs.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 2 p.m. Tickets cost $12-$14, seniors $10-$12, students $8-$10. For information, call (609) 258-7062. On the Web: www.pst2003.com