Theatre review: Comedic snap of Metro Theatre’s Barefoot in the Park gives retro setting a timeless resonance
Sharp dialogue and restless energy, prodded on by the little irritations of married life, result in cozy yet unsettling laughs
Barefoot in the Park. Photo by Mark Halliday (Moonrider Productions)
Metro Theatre presents Barefoot in the Park to February 14
SOME THINGS HAVE changed since the 1960s. Couples now tend to live together before getting married, if getting married is even the goal. And even if you squint and adjust for inflation, the idea of paying $150 in rent in New York City feels closer to folklore than history.
Metro Theatre’s production of Barefoot in the Park doesn’t really try to argue with any of that. Director Mark Carter lets the play stay in its neat little slice of time and seems comfortable trusting that the rest will take care of itself.
And, mostly, it does. There are still irresponsible landlords, strange neighbours, and bad housing markets. Moments of realization that being in love doesn’t actually exempt you from the logistics of adulthood. Neil Simon’s classic comedy lives in that gap between the crude, practical business of daily life and the romantic optimism of a bygone era. It follows two newlyweds who discover, almost immediately, that they may be catastrophically mismatched, just as real life arrives in the form of a fifth-floor walk-up (six if you count the stoop) with no elevator.
The vivacious new bride, Corie, largely avoids the breathless business of climbing the stairs, decorating and arranging the place between waiting for her husband to come home from work and receiving a small collection of kooky visitors. Even so, her restless energy and the sound of her heels scurrying around and up and down the small apartment become a big part of the play’s rhythm.
Her up-and-coming lawyer husband, Paul, far more practical-minded and already disillusioned with the apartment, tries and fails to keep her feet on the ground, so to speak.
Compromise hovers over the whole thing, though it takes a series of small irritations, inevitably escalated for comic effect, to get anyone there. Along the way, the play brings in two recurring visitors: Corie’s sweet, honest, and deeply repressed mother, and the eccentric neighbour (a smooth-talking Andy Rukes) who lives upstairs in the attic. Both are immediately comedically gratifying, particularly Corie’s mother as played by the endlessly charming Rhona McCallum Lichtenwald. The two leads, not unlike the rhythms of their new marital life, take a little longer to settle in.
In the case of Corie, actor Maia Beresford starts out a little nervy. Her occasional worry over whether Paul will like the apartment or the life she’s enthusiastically assembling around them makes her affection feel genuine. There’s also wide-eyed curiosity here, and plenty of warmth, although the character’s supposed sense of unbridled adventure is slower to emerge.
As Paul, David Grof shows increasingly zany flashes of feeling beneath the cold of the character’s lawyerly logic. Ultimately, the pair is more convincing in their irritation with each other than in their early, honeymoon-stage attraction. That imbalance lingers through the first act, before the dialogue rhythm sharpens in Act 2.
Glenn MacDonald’s set is well suited to the play’s moments of physical comedy, and captures the particular awkwardness of a first apartment that already feels like a compromise. And though the skylight—which, of course, also becomes a problem—isn’t quite a skylight here, reading more like a very high window, the sight gags involving this feature of the apartment work just as well.
For anyone who grew up watching sitcoms like Bewitched, I Love Lucy, or I Dream of Jeannie, or caught them later in reruns, there’s something cozily familiar in the broad comedy as well as in the trope of a free-spirited woman married to a more old-fashioned man. But as simple as its premise might be, what Barefoot in the Park doesn’t offer is a fantasy release valve. In this brownstone pressure cooker, the pleasure comes less from reassurance than from the snap of the dialogue and the simple act of watching two people go at each other, with just enough distance to start thinking through your own life choices. Maybe the only decision more consequential than choosing a life partner is choosing the right living quarters. 
Barefoot in the Park. Photo by Mark Halliday (Moonrider Productions)
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