Why is Neil Simon's The Dinner Party so improved and more likeable at the Paper Mill Playhouse than it was on Broadway? The answer is the cast. Although the ensemble for the Broadway production included such high-profile performers as Henry Winkler and John Ritter, they were not only poorly cast as Parisians but displayed a reckless disregard for anything that could be considered a competent characterization. With the help of a more carefully conscripted cast, Simon's play can be looked at with new eyes. It is no masterpiece, but it can be seen now as an amusingly bittersweet entertainment filled with lilting dialogue and a genuine point of view. Whatever reason Simon had to pick the French as subjects for his play is never clear, unless he thinks that three divorced American couples are less prone to revealing the regrets pain and pleasures of their private lives at a dinner party.
Although "The Dinner Party" lasts only 100 or so minutes with no intermission, it contains much that is rueful as well as funny about why marriages fail. Within designer John Lee Beatty's very pretty evocation of a private dining salon, with its grand wall-covering mural a la Fragonard, all six divorcees are on call to expose and exorcise the personal demons that soured their marriages. The first to arrive is Claude Pichon (Greg Mullavey), an antiquarian with a condescending air. He is soon followed by Albert Donay (Michael Mastro), a dopey proprietor of a car-rental agency. That they don't know each other, or seem to have any social connections is further confounded when they realize their invitations to dinner are from the divorce lawyer they have in common. Things get more uncomfortable with the arrival of Andre Bouville (Steve Vinovich), an arrogant, stiff-necked clothing manufacturer, who also had the same lawyer. His overt disdain for the other two is nothing compared to his and the other men's response and reactions to the women that begin to arrive. This is in the form of bon mots and one-liners that are expectedly less French-fried than they are Simon-ized.
Next to arrive is Claude's ex-wife Mariette Levieux (Elizabeth Heflin), a stylish and attractive writer of pulp fiction, who apparently had a short post-divorce fling with Andre. She paves the way for Yvonne Fouchet (Catherine Lloyd Burns), Albert's irritatingly timid and tense ex wife. Last to arrive is Andre's ex-wife Gabrielle Buonocelli (Meg Foster), whom we discover is the manipulator and whose secreted agenda is supposed to be the raison d'etre for this unsettling little soiree.
Mullavey, a veteran of over 70 plays, does well as the insufferably stiff Claude, earning our empathy and our laughs when his sexual fantasies are revealed. Mastro, who was praised for his Broadway performances in Judgement at Nuremberg and Side Man, gets high marks for the hilariously off-centered countenance he sustains as the overly attentive husband who ruined his marriage with too much love. Vinovich, an alumnus of Simon's Lost in Yonkers, is excellent as the mean spirited, unforgiving Andre. Both Heflin, as the newly fulfilled and successful novelist, and Burns, as the ditsy Yvonne, are delightfully realized portrayals. Although more familiar for her film and TV appearances, Foster is not only convincing as a glamorous seductress but gives a centering dramatic force to the comedy. The play moves along, as each couple get a chance to face each other with the facts and feelings that presumably led to their breakup. I won't spoil the play noting the various revelations and regrets except to say that while none of it is sociologically or psychologically profound or convincing, it will give you pause to reflect on your own marriage...or divorce.
Most remarkable is that all that was previously stilted and posy in performance on Broadway has become brisk and bright under the direction of John Rando, who also directed it on Broadway. It shows what a difference a different cast can make.
