Review: CHAPTER TWO Shows the Happy Heartbreak of Starting Over

"Retro" is popular. The older we get, the easier it is to sink into nostalgia and crave artistic expressions of a "simpler" time. The vulnerability of this emotional rabbit hole is the fact that nostalgia is a heavily edited mindset in which we remember around the unsavory aspects of bygone eras. Ensemble's production of Chapter Two, Neil Simon's 1977 living-room comedy about a second marriage, tackles the problems that come with an obsession with the past. The production features the fun of 1970s Manhattan living: the audacious fashion; non-ironic carpet; the simplicity of a binary gender system; and using a telephone with a cord to actually talk to people. But Chapter Two equally embraces the helplessness of nostalgia by pointing out that living in one tailored version of a remembered past affects healthy engagement with the present.

Directed by Andrew Barnicle, who returns to the Ensemble stage after last year's Fallen Angels, Chapter Two's talented cast explores new romance through the eyes of middle-aged lovers in mourning for previous relationships. After his wife passes away, George Schneider (Todd Weeks) steps into the dating world for the first time in almost twenty years. He meets Jennie Malone (Caroline Kingsolving), a confident young divorcé freshly absolved from an unsatisfying marriage, and the two fall in love quickly. The couple decides to wed after only a few weeks, which strikes the two comedic foils, Jenny's daffy bestie, Faye (Heather Ayers), and George's wisecracking brother, Leo (Thomas Vincent Kelly), as rash, since George and Jennie are in completely different places in their grieving processes.

While George's neurotic nature and witty repartee is charming, it also indicates a buried emotional dilemma: George is simultaneously desperate to both move on from and cling to the memory of his late wife. He recognizes the urge for happiness with Jennie, yet Jennie symbolizes a replacement for lost love. George and Jennie finally (literally) exit the honeymoon phase and have the conversation they should have had before getting hitched: George feels guilty that he can't shut out the memory of his first wife, and he feels worse that he both does and doesn't want to move forward.

This foray into autobiography (after losing his first wife to illness, Simon married his second wife only weeks after meeting her) loads Chapter Two with true emotional quandaries that have, perhaps, no ideal outcome. It's in the resulting compromises that the characters tap into true representations of human relationships. Director Andrew Barnicle helms a production that successfully harnesses the clever comedy in the quick timing of Simon's dialogue, and Weeks presents George as a character just on the verge of falling to pieces-his emotional state is sturdy enough to push the narrative forward, but not so unflappable that the drama of discovering how to love both his current and his late wife seems manageable. The characters exist in George and Jennie's respective living rooms, which share the stage and meet in the middle, an attractive way to show both the merging and the separation of the characters' worlds. Chapter Two, a play about starting over and the importance of learning from previous experiences, is an enjoyable comedy appropriate for the winter transition into a new year.

Ensemble Presents:

Chapter Two

by Neil Simon
directed by Andrew Barnicle
December 1-18
At The New Vic Theater

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