No matter what age, if you fall in love with somebody and you move in with them, you have to fall in love all over again. That's the universal thing about the play: Everybody who has ever been in love and moved in with somebody has gone through stuff like this. They got married and then they lived together. "The different thing about them is that people didn't live together before they got married. "They're naïve," Elliott observed of Paul and Corie. Paul could come off as a boorish jerk and Corie could seem a flightly fool. Those who know the play realize it's a delicate dance for any actors playing Paul and Corie. Mom eventually forms an unexpected bond with the upstairs bohemian, Victor Velasco, played by Tony Roberts (who played Paul late in the original Broadway run in 1965). That process is made more intense in the context of new home, new closeness, new job (for Paul) and visits by Corie's widowed New Jersey mother (played by Jill Clayburgh). These are people who haven't really experienced each other: The twentysomething Paul and Corie still have a lot to learn about marital negotiation. The social context is traditional American marriage - where you are expected to get married and then live together. The tiny apartment is the setting for marital fireworks between Paul, a young, buttoned-down lawyer played by Patrick Wilson, and wife Corie, the free-spirit (played by Amanda Peet). "I said to him, 'This feels like a Greenwich Village play.'" Elliott said it's now West 11th Street "because that's where I lived when I first lived in the village…on West 11th Street! I lived in a third-floor walkup." "That's where Neil lived when he first got married," Elliott explained. The location has been changed to Greenwich Village. The script indicates that the fifth-floor walkup apartment (whose exhausting stairs are a running joke from Scene One) is located on East 48th Street. It's still not cynical yet, and I think that's the beauty of the play - it's not cynical, it's emotional." "I try to make it a challenge to myself to try to make it as clear possible. "I don't like to write 'time' and 'place' in the program," Elliott said. Elliott, with Simon's blessing, has placed the action in 1965, just when America was on the brink of explosive social changes. You can really look into, and find a lot in, the play - it gives you a lot of clues to what their needs are."įor this first Broadway revival of the famous comedy about young love - a play inspired by Simon's first marriage to wife Joan - Simon is tweaking a couple of lines here and there, Elliott said, and there will be only one intermission in a script once broken into three acts. "We're playing them as real people," Elliott told Jan. From Top: Amanda Peet and Patrick Wilson Jill Clayburgh and Tony Roberts.
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