Acting Company's 'California Suite' deserves big hand

The Acting Company players have done not only a good job but a daring job with "California Suite," a Neil Simon tale stuffed with Manhattan/Hollywood movie industry insider wisecracks.

The four scenes are one-act plays involving five couples whose only link is the same Beverly Hills Hotel suite location in the title. All the segments employ character-types and references long associated with Jewish culture in the New York metropolitan area.

So? So writers write what they know. Playwright and screenwriter Simon was born in the Bronx and made a fortune scribing such situations. Woody Allen has mined that same vein of gold, only from the Brooklyn nebbish end of the mother lode.

The first slice of upscale life in "California Suite" is about a child custody dispute between a Manhattan magazine editor and her ex-husband writer transplanted to Hollywood.

The second involves a Philadelphia wife meeting her husband in Hollywood to attend a bar mitzvah, only to find him in bed with a comatose hooker.

The third in this quatrain of quarrels is about a London couple — the wife an aging actress nominated for an Academy Award, the husband a gay antique dealer — in town for Oscars night.

The fourth encounter is between two couples exhausted from trying not to kill each other after suffering through three weeks of vacationing together. There is clearly a downside to propinquity.

"California Suite" opened June 30, 1976, and ran at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre in New York for 446 nights before closing in 1977. The Broadway original snagged no awards, but Maggie Smith won a best supporting actress Oscar for her role in the star-studded 1978 Christmas movie version.

The Acting Company production is directed by Joe Moye and it is, overall, quite the best of his several efforts in community theater.

Between them, the cast of four — Debbie Collier, Chris Collier, Gary L. Conover and Maria Katanic — play nine roles. Tiffany Manley stood in for Holly Harlan as the corpse-like character under the covers in scene two.

Truth to tell, I had never seen either the play or the movie, so when I told my out of town editor-agent I'd be writing about it, she couldn't suppress an unequivocal, "Ugh!"

"I hated both the play and the movie," she said. Thus, I was all primed to suffer through the Yuba City version.

However, while there were some shortcomings the eagle-eyed might notice about The Acting Company version — a few flubbed lines, dialogue dragging here and there, the whole thing a trifle long — there were some definitely good points to it.

To start with, "California Suite" is the most overall professional-looking production done at The Acting Company in recent times.

The sets were tasteful, complete and well-put together, with most of the decor on loan from Evans Furniture, director Joe Moye said.

The props were aptly arranged so stage manager Lori Moye could keep the set changes mercifully swift.

Lighting and sound were both handled well. Nothing fancy, maybe, but the whole purpose of light and sound is to keep things so subtle, it does not come to the notice of the audience unless it is supposed to.

And the cast wasn't too large for the stage.

Four actors playing eight roles is hard work, and they all had their lines in hand. It was pleasant to see the relatively new faces of Conover and Katanic. Both did yeomen's work in their several parts — and it's nice to see bald men getting a chance to star.

Not all scenes were to my liking. I'm not sure all the shouting and wrestling and wheedling and arguing in scene four were needed. The whole play ran two hours and 30 minutes, not including the intermission, and that last scene could have been cut entirely.

But I can see Simon's dramatic reasoning behind the fourth scene. It brings all four main actors together for the close and it provides the Big Finish directors insist is a must.

The first scene with Conover as the Hollywood writer husband squabbling with Debbie Collier as the New York magazine wife was a bit too static. Two actors sitting in chairs chatting and arguing for a half-hour can be boring. But the two pulled it off, each giving genuine dimension to their characters as the scene unfolded.

Best surprise of all was scene three in which the husband and wife Chris and Debbie Collier played the husband and wife Sidney and Diana Nichols.

Their characters were from London, but the Colliers didn't overdo it with the British accents, a voice gimmick which is tougher to maintain than audiences might realize.

Chris Collier, who has a tendency to over-act — stage acting demands much more output from an actor than film or television, so that's a constant danger — did not overdo Sidney's gayness.

Michael Caine, who played the Sidney Nichols role in the movie and taught acting, would have given Chris Collier a sincere round of applause if he'd been there Saturday night.

Debbie Collier really delivered with a much-nuanced performance of Diana Nichols. She ran her Diana through a gamut ranging from cynical to regretful and from anxious to wistful.

Together, the Colliers portrayed the Nicholses as a couple who went from settled in, to drifting apart and then, in the end, coming together again in the mutual realization that they were each what the other needed and the best either would do. They were a perfect couple, in a bittersweet fashion. They "connected" with the audience.

Also astounding about this play is the courage the producers and actors showed just by attempting it here.

In "California Suite," the actors mention hysterectomies, prostate operations and shacking up with lovers. They use swear words all the way up to the dreaded F-word. No kidding!

This may be routine fare in New York and Los Angeles, but it is unheard of in Yuba-Sutter, where there are some 110 churches listed in the Yellow Pages, many of them of the cloying, archly fundamentalist, bless-you-and-praise-that variety.

We're talking ground-breaking stuff here!

This is particularly funny when you consider how dated the 1976 dialogue, references and situations are in "California Suite." How many under 30 are going to catch the insider references to Tatum O'Neal, Faye Dunaway and Joe Levine (that would likely be long-time Hollywood bigshot Joseph E. Levine, who backed "The Graduate," "The Producers" and "Carnal Knowledge," among other boffo films of the day).

Swearing on stage and hookers in bed with bar mitzvah guests may have been readily accepted in worldly Manhattan and Hollywood 30 years ago, but the typical Yuba City resident in 2008 is still likely to find them shocking, simply shocking!

For their daring and style, the cast and director of "California Suite," which runs at The Acting Company through March 2, deserve a big hand from local theater lovers.

Award-winning journalist and author Tom Nadeau has written for and acted on stage, screen, radio and television. Write to him at theaterland@gmail.com.