Neil Simon’s new play “Proposals” is a late-in-life attempt by the playwright to get beyond mere laughs and take up in an intensely personal way the painful themes of lost love and mortality.
For the play’s leading ladies–L. Scott Caldwell and Suzanne Cryer–“Proposals” is fulfilling for a different reason. It represents success, arrived at along far different paths.
For Cryer, a product of posh Greenwich, Conn., it’s part of a magically successful fledging career that in a mere two years has taken the poised young actress from Yale Drama School to having her name in lights as a star on Broadway.
For Caldwell, the daughter of a South Side Chicago domestic much like the woman she plays so commandingly in “Proposals,” the new Simon work and her centerpiece role represents the fruit of some years of struggle and theatrical labor.
Set in the Pocono Mountains in the 1950s, “Proposals” is in part intended as a tribute to Simon’s late, first wife Joan, who spent her last months in such mountains before dying of cancer in 1973.
But Cryer’s character is Joan Simon in the form of a young, sharply witty and much-wooed college girl. Simon lends his autobiographical presence in two forms, as the most literary and least clownish of the daughter’s three young swains, but also as her divorced, aging, regretful father, a minor chain-store mogul who’s not only in the autumn of his life but threatened by an ultimately fatal heart condition.
The pillar of the family is the family housekeeper, the first major role Simon ever wrote for an African-American and one with which the remarkable Caldwell dominates her every scene.
It’s an entertaining work — Simon’s tried and true laugh machine thrumming along in good order — but his attempt to deal with serious themes without breaking free from the authorly comforts and box office safety of dinner-theater comedy has not entirely pleased the critics.
“It still tends to break down into mechanical, self-contained segments,” complained the New York Times. “Dueling one-liners, lip-biting emotional confrontations and long embroideries on single comic conceits.”
But Caldwell and Cryer have pleased virtually everybody, both here at New York’s Broadhurst Theatre and in the successful preliminary run earlier in the fall at Washington’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
“I know I have some lines that are funny and Scotty certainly has lines that are funny,” said Cryer, “but I don’t look at it as jokes. There were a couple of lines I had that I thought were jokes and weren’t real and I tried to get them changed. Most of the stuff I didn’t feel was character driven is gone. As much as possible I like to protect the feeling that I’m standing on stage having a real conversation.”
And if some in the audience don’t get beyond the comedy, that’s all right with Caldwell.
“Neil Simon makes people laugh,” she said. “I think that’s a pretty terrific thing, actually, even when it’s the lowest common denominator. He has something for everyone who goes to the theater.”
Though the family in the play is clearly identified as Jewish, Cryer won her part despite a personna that, like fellow Greenwich resident and Yale graduate George Bush, is decidedly WASP.
“I’m not Jewish,” she said. “I have a WASPy aspect. I don’t think Neil thought I was the most Jewish person in the world. I think he cast me because I remind him of Joan. Neil made jokes that this is the first Christian play he’s ever written, and in some ways it has some of that. But we’re not (A.R.) Gurney characters. We actually touch each other.”
It’s not every young actress two years out of college who can go about referring to Broadway legend Simon simply as “Neil,” but the tall, breezy, open Cryer is as self-assured and unself-conscious about it as she is unpretentious and friendly.
And talented. Not only did she get to big-time Broadway in record time, she did it without waiting on a single table.
Immediately upon hitting New York she was cast in a movie–a small, independent film noir flick she’s just as happy has not been released.
“My father asked me if I was nervous about it because I walk around naked in it. I said, `No, I’m nervous because of my acting.’ “
She did Shakespeare and other classic drama at regional stages in the New York area as well as Utah and Dallas. Moving to California, she won rave reviews in Donald Margulies’ critically applauded “Collected Stories” at South Coast Rep.
“I was incredibly lucky,” she said. “My timing was good. But I think I deserve a little bit of the credit. I went out there and did a play when my agent said, `That won’t get you anything,’ and I said, `No, you’re wrong. It will.’ “
It got her a reading and casting in “Proposals,” and she also has a role in the new David Mamet movie, “Wag the Dog.”
Caldwell has not been so incredibly lucky.
Joining Cryer for a backstage interview, she listened to her colleague talk about her Greenwich childhood, then said afterward:
“I didn’t have training. I didn’t have dance lessons or anything when I was growing up. I was listening to Suzanne saying that she and her folks used to go to the opera and the ballet and that. The first play my mother ever saw I was in. I didn’t have background in the arts at all. I used to like to pretend when I was a kid, so I would hide in the closet and make up stories and pretend to be other people.”
Her mother was a maid and away from home during the day, so Caldwell was attended to by a family friend who was a cleaning woman in a South Side theater.
“I watched movies every day,” she said. “I wanted to be whatever character Bette Davis was playing, or Loretta Young. I wanted to be Loretta Young.”
In 1966, she saw the Negro Ensemble Company of New York perform a play at Chicago’s Hyde Park Theater.
“That was the first time I’d ever seen any black people on stage,” she said. “It occurred to me that was something I could do.”
Her academic excellence at Hyde Park High School got her admitted to Northwestern University and she went on from there to study drama at Loyola, finishing in 1974.
But, despite the theatrical renaissance that Chicago enjoyed in the mid-’70s, she could find little or no work. Finally, she went to New York to study acting with the renowned Uta Hagen and was invited to join the same Negro Ensemble Company whose performance had inspired her career choice a decade before.
She made her Broadway debut in Samm Art Williams’ Tony-nominated “Home,” playing 11 different characters, and in 1989 won a Tony Award herself for her performance in August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.”
“I wasn’t interested in looking at the `Proposals’ script because it was the role of a maid,” she said. “But they said just look at the script. Once I got to the description, an African-American woman in her forties with a ribbon in hair, it was interesting to me. Maids usually have handkerchiefs over their hair. I turned the page and found I could say these words. I was totally in touch–something connected. It was almost a sensed memory.
“People can be snobbish about Simon’s work, but I’m not one of those people. I never thought I’d find myself in a Neil Simon play, but I am honored I’m in one.”
