Barefoot In The Park

Reviewed by Holly Bartges

For fun laughability and rib tickling exercise, there is nothing like a Neil Simon play. That is, a Neil Simon play well put together, insightfully directed, and well acted. Well acted with a courageous cast wrapping themselves snugly in Simon’s very funny and human characters. A cast playing the lines straight without indicating something very funny is about to happen.

Hannah Middleton as Corie and Andy Lacerte as Paul in the Denver Victorian’s Barefoot in the Park. Photo by Sarah Roshan

Barefoot In The Park’s current production definitely stands up to the criteria, bringing The Denver Victorian Playhouse theatre to hysterical life, and near full houses.

Sarah Roshan, known widely for her scenic designs and scenic arts, ventures into adult theatre demonstrating a strong talent for directing. Having directed a couple of children’s plays, and a staged reading this year for the Playwright Showcase at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities and Red Rocks Community College, Barefoot In the Park reveals Roshan knows a great deal more about directing than just showing the actors where to be on stage and when.

No small trick. There are those who have directed for years and still have no clue about character development, much less how to reach into an actor’s soul to bring out individual characteristics the actor doesn’t even know lives there. Roshan holds that talented ability in the palm of her hand.

Simon zeroes in on Corrie and Paul. It’s 1963. Married for all of six days, the couple just moved into their small, very small, New York City apartment. Some would say Barefoot is dated material because of the existing attitudes prior to the Women’s Liberation Movement. Women thought their life needed to revolve around “a man in their life.” Others might argue the attitude continues to live quite nicely, thank you, in deep pockets around the country.

Either way, it doesn’t matter; the characters shimmer in their own aliveness and self-constructed circumstances with charm, warmth, humor, knockdown drag out arguments, and tenderness.

The cohesiveness of the cast stands out, tying the characters together with chemistry sizzling around the edges of the stage.

Hannah Middleton, a theatre major at the University of Northern Colorado, has several acting credits under her belt, making her acting debut in a real live Denver theatre as Corie Bratter. No question. Middleton has a theatre future as an actor.

Middleton grabs Corrie by the throat, disappears into the young married woman’s persona, wrapped in idealistic joyous enthusiasm for everything and everyone. The “everything” includes a relatively inexpensive apartment. Never mind it takes six flights of stairs to reach the front door, seven if the front stoop is counted. Corie, however, insists it is only a front stoop. A tiny apartment where a walk-in closet has been turned into a bedroom, a bedroom big enough for an over sized single bed and absolutely nothing else. A tiny apartment where the kitchen area takes a corner of the one room with a stove that doesn’t work, and a bathroom with no tub.

Never mind her husband Paul prefers taking baths. Never mind Paul, a young lawyer, returns home from work expecting to be living in a third floor apartment with furniture already in place. What he finds is an exhausting out of breath climb up six flights of stairs, insisting the stoop should be classified as seven. And an empty apartment.

Paul comes to life with the assistance of Andy Lacerte, a senior at UNC majoring in Theatre Acting. Lacerte gives Paul the intelligence required for an up and coming young lawyer and the charm to understand why Corie’s bounding enthusiastic nature fell head over heels in love with him.

Luke Allen Terry as Harry Pepper, the Telephone Repair Man, convinces the audience immediately he hasn’t just walked through a stage door. Panting and gasping for breath he creates the illusion he has just indeed trudged up six flights of stairs. Terry takes this small role and gives it a professional twist of honest believability and significant place in the Barefoot scenario. Personable, warm, sincere etched in professionalism, Harry provides Corie with a humored empathetic attitude.

Peter Burghart brings the Delivery Man very much to life. Having conquered the six flights of stairs with several more wedding gifts from Corie’s mother. Honest and believable defines Burghart’s not so empathetic demeanor about the number of stairs he has to climb. Significant to point out, Burghart takes his few minutes on stage seriously and not just a body to fill in the gaps on stage.

There is a method to Corie’s madness over the top floor apartment. Hoping beyond a shadow of a doubt, the long hard climb up the stairs serves as a deterrent for her over bearing mother from just popping in at every concocted opportunity.

It’s not that her mother is mean or vicious or a nosy mother-in-law. Now that Corie has gotten married and moved out of the family home, Mrs. Banks finds loneliness sews together the cracks in her life in living alone. She just simply doesn’t know what to do.

Anne Meyers turns Mrs. Banks into a warm-hearted, misguided lost-in-the-woods soul who knows how to lay out the road map for the guilt trip she hopes Corie will take. Meyers breathes humorous life into Mrs. Banks’ fur-coated perplexity having an independent daughter. Out of breath from conquering the stairs, it is clear to Corie Mrs. Banks has no intention of letting anything stand in her way from visiting her daughter. Even though she lives in New Jersey, the grabbing-for-straws mother always concludes she just happens to be in the New York City neighborhood.

The erratic, eccentric Victor Valesco comes to Corie’s rescue, even though Paul thinks she has lost her mind. Brought to hysterical off-the-wall life, Wade P. Wood gives one of finest performances of his career.

Living in the attic, behind on his rent, Victor loses his key to his apartment to the landlord. Being the free spirit he is, he knows how to climb through the apartment window to get home. Thinking the apartment is empty; he just walks in, scaring himself and Corie with his surprise entrance. Full of life, unconcerned about his financial affairs, a juicy womanizer with a built-in opportunistic nature, he plans on “falling in love with Corie by 7 PM.”

Corie sees hope in the encounter and invites him and her Mother to dinner Friday night without realizing the stove doesn’t work.

Although the furniture was supposed to arrive by 5 PM, it doesn’t. Paul knows it isn’t coming. Corie’s belief system won’t let her think otherwise.

Arriving between Act I and Act II, the scene change is one of the cleverest Intermissions designed. Victor takes charge instructing the out of breath delivery men where each piece should be.

Rachael Lanning designed the set that goes from an empty, just painted apartment with a ladder standing in the middle, to one with functional furnishings for the just married couple. Lanning also designed the lighting, fitting it snugly into the context of this warm, enchanting relationship-discovering venture for a newly married couple and two older people discovering there is life beyond an attic and life beyond loneliness.

Discovering the value of compromise the hard way for a married couple, Paul and Corie run into a brick wall. She wants this proper, dignified systematic lawyer to be spontaneous. He thinks walking barefoot through the park in cold weather is absurd. Without realizing it, their tiny disagreement turns into a full-blown maybe-we’ve-made-a-horrendous mistake deal breaker.

In Act III, one calamity follows another with humored seriousness and serious humor with the tight-knit cast flowing together.

It’s one of Simon’s welcome-to-the-human-race moments of recognition of what it means to be a human being, how valuable and meaningful relationships are when nurtured, even when nurturing guidebooks do not exist and one has to stumble through the dark without a flashlight.

Barefoot In The Park under no circumstances should be missed at the Vic with this cast, with this director, in this particular space. Call for reservations. There is risk to just walking in.