Stage

Simple Simon

Appleseed suffers Fools gladly, a throwback to Neil Simon's earlier, make-em-laugh comedies

In the chronology of Neil Simon's comedies, Fools, currently being staged by Appleseed Productions, appears just before the autobiographical Brighton Beach trilogy: 1983's Brighton Beach Memoirs, 1985's Biloxi Blues and 1986's Broadway Bound. Thus, Fools is kind of a last gasp of silliness before the plays that will define his legacy as a playwright.

Clearly inspired by the Jewish folk tales about Chelm, the Eastern European town of simpletons, the play tells the story of Leon Tolchinsky, a schoolteacher who answers an ad to tutor a student in the Ukrainian village of Kulyenchikov. The town is doomed to labor blissfully under a curse of stupidity until a particular fair maiden either marries the right man or becomes educated.

Kulyenchikov is the type of a town in which a fishmonger sells only flowers and the postman delivers mail to the person whose mood matches the message. As the dialogue tells us, it's a place where maple syrup is used as a bookmark. In other words, whimsy is the order of the day, and in Fools it comes in double helpings.

The play is a prolonged skit with the slimmest of storylines, a throwback to Simon's days as a writer for the 1950s NBC-TV sketchcom Your Show of Shows. One can imagine Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca tearing into the script--for about 15 minutes or so. Simply stated, Fools is not Simon at his best. The jokes wear pretty thin by intermission. However, what the enthusiastic Appleseed cast lacks in clever material, it makes up for in good-natured performances.

As Leon, the hapless schoolteacher, Tom Ciancaglini plows through rough patches of dialogue with reckless abandon. His Leon is clearly a man on a mission. Eyes shining with zealotry, Ciancaglini brings a desperately funny edge to the role of the sane man stuck in a crazy world.

Buoyed by his exuberant performance, the cast endows each townsperson with his or her own brand of stupidity. As Dr. Zubritsky, whose family's fate is tied to the stupidity curse, Tom Minion resembles a befuddled stork as he labors to write a prescription or administer an eye examination. Anne Fitzgerald plays his wife Lenya as a demented marionette, continually surprised at her own inability to clap her hands or turn a doorknob.

Their daughter Sophia (Megan Flanagan), who has recently learned how to sit, resembles nothing less than a beflowered dumpling, grinning idiotically through her romantic travails. She is pursued by Count Yousekevitch (Mark Allen Holt), who can't quite hide his simplemindedness behind a fulsome smirk. Noteworthy among the townspeople is Ted Limpert as the shepherd Snetsky, who can't even remember his own first name.

Director Greg Hipius extends the borders of the lunacy beyond the footlights, with amiable cast members mingling easily with the audience and improvising at the drop of a hat. Fools can easily bear this approach. With this collection of silly jokes and puns, there's not an awful lot to muck up.

Sometimes, however, the action onstage slows down. This type of comedy should be performed at a breakneck pace, because we shouldn't have too much time to think about things. Some complicated stage business with a balcony is ineffective due to the limitations of the Appleseed stage, located within the Atonement Lutheran Church, 116 W. Glen Ave. Also, costuming is inconsistent, with lapses in both peasant dress and the1890 time period.

Still, C.J. Young's candy-colored lighting and sprawling set, a collection of storefronts spilling off the stage and into the audience, suggest a Russian Disney World, an appropriate background for a show in which a cow is milked upside down so it will give the cream first.

This production runs through Saturday, May 17. See Times Table for information.