The Good Doctor, Washington Stage Guild, Washington, DC

 

Full Disclosure: at this time 45 years ago, as a graduate student in drama at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, I was preparing to direct a production of The Good Doctor as part of thesis requirements for a Master of Fine Arts degree. The production was presented in December 1977. At the suggestion of the theatre faculty, I increased the cast from five to seven in order to provide two more actors with performance opportunities. My preparation included in-depth research on the play, its author, its inspiration, and its original production. The production was critically well-received (and more importantly, ultimately approved by my thesis committee). In the intervening years, I never saw the play produced, only a version PBS aired in 1978. I was, therefore, especially looking forward to the current production by the Washington Stage Guild (WSG) at the Undercroft Theatre.

Pardon me for quoting my thesis as I described why I wanted to direct the play:

The Good Doctor presents a unique combination of two “masters,” America’s foremost comedy playwright, Neil Simon, and Anton Chekhov, one of the most prolific short story writers and playwrights of late nineteenth century Russia. In essence, it attempts to bridge a gap between two centuries, two cultures, and two worlds, delivering the message that, after all, the similarities between people are boundless, and far exceed the differences.

The play represents a great challenge to seven performers. Each is called upon to bring a minimum of three characters to life during the course of the play. Working with a large number of diverse characters in a number of scenes provides a great directorial challenge as well….

After several years contributing sketches for such television classics as Your Show of Shows and [Sid] Caesar’s Hour, Neil Simon’s reputation as a playwright was established in the 1960s with an unequalled series of hit comedies including Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, and Plaza Suite (and their film adaptations). He also adapted the musical books for Sweet Charity and Promises, Promises from other sources. Anton Chekhov’s reputation as a playwright comes primarily from five plays written before his premature death at age 44. Before writing those plays, he wrote and sold dozens of short stories to provide for his family and pay for his medical education. A trained physician, he possessed both a scientist’s objectivity and an artist’s sensibilities and spirit. (Neil Simon’s nickname from boyhood was “Doc,” so the play’s title has a dual significance.)

The Good Doctor represented a significant change in tone for Simon, master of the one-liners now writing outside his usual New York environment. The original 1973 production featured a noteworthy cast: Christopher Plummer, Rene Auberjonois, Barnard Hughes, Frances Sternhagen (who won a Tony for her performance), and Marsha Mason. However, the play received decidedly mixed reviews and closed after 208 performances, one of the shortest runs of any Simon production. (By contrast, Barefoot in the Park ran for 1530 performances.) Simon would go on to further success and to write more serious plays, including an autobiographical trilogy (Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and Broadway Bound) and a Pulitzer Prize-winner (Lost in Yonkers), as well as original screenplays.

The play is particularly well-suited to the intimate theatre space where the WSG operates, beneath Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church in downtown DC. Director Laura Giannarelli keeps the tone light and uses the space effectively, creating differentiated environments for the various scenes. The play’s designers, Joseph B. Musumeci Jr. (scenery), Sigrid Johannesdottir (costumes), and Marianne Meadows (lighting), serve the play well, evoking locale, mood, and period.

There are six scenes in each of the play’s two acts, which range from near-slapstick comedy (“The Sneeze,” “Surgery,” “The Drowned Man,” “A Defenseless Creature”) to moments of deeply felt emotional connection and introspection (“The Governess,” “The Audition,” “The Arrangement”). The scenes are held together by the presence of the Writer (played with understanding and understatement by Cameron McNary). While the character of the Writer appears to be Chekhov, Simon believed that the character incorporated many of his own traits and feelings.

I quibble that the WSG represents the play as “by Neil Simon and Anton Chekhov.” The play was originally presented as “by Neil Simon, Adapted from and Suggested by Anton Chekhov,” which is significantly more accurate. Turning someone else’s stories into dramatic scenes is different from creating those scenes altogether. Two scenes (“The Writer” and “The Arrangement”) focus on characters based on Chekhov and his father, but were specifically created by Simon. The original production also included the credit line “Additional Lyrics by Neil Simon, Incidental Music by Peter Link.” No mention is made of Link in the WSG program, though he composed the music for the play’s only song.

Five very talented actors comprise the WSG cast. In addition to embodying the Writer so well, Cameron McNary hits the right comic notes as a seducer of other men’s wives in “The Seduction” and the right emotional notes as the Writer’s Father in “The Arrangement.” Lynn Steinmetz proves the irony of the scene titled “A Defenseless Creature.” Steinmetz and Morgan Duncan share touching moments in “Too Late for Happiness,” the only scene in the play with a song. Duncan and McNary delight in “A Quiet War,” a scene not included in the play’s original production (or my production). Scott Harrison’s characterizations tend to be more physically comedic to good effect, particularly as a low-level civil servant who sneezes on his superior in “The Sneeze” and a waterfront entrepreneur in “The Drowned Man.” Arika Thomas is especially effective as the object of “The Seduction” and as an aspiring actress in “The Audition.”

As careful as the design team was in establishing the period of the play, the attention to detail did not extend to hairstyling for the characters played by Harrison and Thomas. The actors’ contemporary ‘dos were a jarring and distracting contrast to the period costumes and furnishings around them.

I am grateful to the WSG for presenting this production of The Good Doctor and I certainly recommend it. I enjoyed it and it gave me a welcomed opportunity to remember the actors, designers, stage manager, and crew members who made my long-ago production a success.