'Tis the Season

By T.E.K.

THE SUNSHINE BOYS by NEIL SIMON

Santa Claus is just an alias for Neil Simon. Every year just before Christmas, he loads up packets of goodies and tosses two unbridled hours of laughter to Broadway audiences. Santa Simon is back again with a cripplingly funny show aptly called The Sunshine Boys.

The two boys are really old men, an ex-vaudeville duo named Lewis (Sam Levene) and Clark (Jack Albertson). Clad always in pajamas and bathrobe, Clark lives alone in one of Manhattan's rundown hotels and is sustained by TV, soup and a weekly copy of Variety brought to him by his solicitous nephew-agent Ben (Lewis J. Stadlen). Clark particularly relishes scanning the obits in the show-biz bible ("Bernie Eisenstein...he was Rodriguez in the dance team of Ramona and Rodriguez").

His erstwhile partner Lewis lives in New Jersey with his daughter, son-in-law and their children, where he can "watch a bush growing," the mildest of the evening's anti-Jersey jokes so dear to the hearts of New Yorkers. The two men have not done a show together in eleven years or spoken privately in twelve. In point of fact, they loathe each other. Clark bears a particular grudge, because Lewis used to finger-poke him in the chest and spray him with saliva during their act. But the potent arm of CBS-TV reunites them to take part in a history-of -comedy spectacular.

They get as far as a dress rehearsal in which the pair does a hilarious variation on the "Dr. Kronkite" sketch, complete with bosomy girl (Lee Meredith), from the repertory of famed vaudevillians Smith and Dale. But Lewis begins poking and spraying, Clark suffers a heart attack, and in the final act, a mellower pair contemplates life together in an old actors' home with grudging equanimity.

Beneath the bantering foolery, the play is warm, affectionate and touching. None of Simon's comedies has been more intimately written out of love and a bone-deep affinity with the theatrical scene and temperament. Simon is helped handsomely by the faultless comic timing of Levene and Albertson, whose weathered countenances testify to the many long seasons they have served the theater with honor. As play goers, we should return the bows that they take and reserve a special one for the annual bounty of Neil Simon. .T.E.K..

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