LITTLE ROCK — The role of Corie in Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park, onstage at the Arkansas Repertory Theatre, is described as a free spirit. But what kind of free spirit wears her auburn hair in headbands and tight chignons, splays on the sofa giggling at the thought of her mother loosening her car coat long enough for a date, and then blanches when it actually happens?
Oh, right - a 1963 model free spirit. Director Bob Hupp refers to this winning production as timeless. It isn't, which isn't a complaint; timelessness is overrated.
Over the summer, television audiences swooned like bobbysoxers under crepe paper streamers for AMC's Mad Men, about Kennedy-era ad agency honchos, and this Barefoot is a similar swinging-'60s aesthetic feast: all string ties, Chinese lanterns and princess phones. Even the furniture is upholstered with martini olives.
An era-appropriate optimism buoys even the bickering as newlyweds Corie (Whitney Kirk) and Paul (Christian Pedersen, something of a Nordic Clark Kent) settle into their sixth-floor Manhattan walk-up. Cynicism is only a waft, as from a too-strong after-work cocktail. When Corie's suburban mother, played with full-throated mirthby Alanna Hamill Newton, tells her daughter she and Paul are likely to end up as one of the two out of every 10 couples who find happiness, Newton trills the line, as her character would; the age of starter marriages isn't even on the horizon glimpsed from the couple's cracked skylight.
If it sounds like the play glides along without conflict, that feels true - even as Kirk and Pedersen slam doors and dance around the word divorce, neither seems at the end of a rope. But chemistry can spark without melodrama, and Simon's structure is fairly surefire in the matchmaking department, dividing the central foursome into two sets of kindred spirits, Paul and Corie's mother on one team and Corie and the spats-wearing, French-accented upstairs eccentric on the other.
That each set has something to teach the other - well, this isn't 1963; you probably could have predicted that. But predictability doesn't diminish the appeal of a tightly scripted, finely observed comedy of bygone manners, in the presence of characters that, if you saw them at a cocktail party, you'd pat the empty, olive-patterned couch cushion next to you and sit and have a swell old time.
Barefoot in the Park continues at the Rep through Nov. 11. Ticket information is available at (501) 378-0405.
Arkansas, Pages 19 on 10/27/2007