"Rose and Walsh," which runs in revival now through Nov. 5 at the Hampton Theatre Company in Quogue, is the last play Neil Simon ever wrote. It also displays the cleverest plot device of his career.
As the play opens, Rose Steiner, a writer, comes downstairs looking for her lover, Walsh McLaren, also a writer, who has gone out for a walk on the beach. When Walsh finally returns, Rose scolds him for leaving the house -- she hates waking up to find him not there in bed with her. Plus, she's in the mood for a little hanky-panky. Only one problem: It soon becomes apparent that Walsh is a figment of Rose's imagination. Her lover died five years ago.
Though dead, Walsh will appear onstage throughout the play; he looms so large in Rose's consciousness he might as well be alive. They carry on lively literary conversations together, argue about the past, and even "make love." In life he was a famous mystery writer, we learn -- and also a womanizer and alcoholic. For all this, Rose can't kick him, even in death.
The setting is a beachfront house in Bridgehampton (with a beautiful set design) where Rose is living with her assistant, Arlene. The plot gets underway when Walsh, concerned for Rose's financial security, alerts her to an unfinished novel of his that is sitting in a living room cupboard. The plan is for Rose to employ a middling writer who just happens to live in nearby Quogue (and whose lone novel Walsh discovers in his robe) to finish it. Walsh's "discovered" final novel will sell for big bucks to a publisher and solve Rose's fiscal worries.
If this all sounds a little thin, it's because it is. This is one of Simon's flimsiest plots.
(Even Rose's financial dilemma doesn't resonate. How will the poor woman survive? How about sell the beachfront property, move to Sag Harbor, and spend the rest of her life stacking gold bars in her closet?)
With such a slapdash starting point, it would take a perfectly humming quartet of actors to elevate the material, but on the night I attended the results were mixed. The pacing felt a beat behind, some of the zingers failed to land, and the play seemed longer than its two-hour running time.
Part of the problem, it seems, is casting. The always-excellent Andrew Botsford is predictably good as Walsh, but he invokes more Philip Roth than the hard-drinking, womanizing Dashiell Hammett type that Simon has written.
Alaina Manzo is lovely and likable as Arlene, and has a moving climactic monologue about being abandoned as a child by her mother. But Arlene is also supposed to be an in-demand screenwriter who, we are told, has turned down multimillion-dollar projects because they're "garbage," an artistic gravitas that Ms. Manzo does not here project.
Similarly, Alexander Massaad as Gavin Clancy nails the handsome Quogue townie that Arlene falls for, but seems less comfortable as the writer he is alleged to be, and his consistently rigid line readings lack the animation that Simon's humor desperately needs.
One wonders how much of this falls on the playwright, whose knowledge of the world of fiction ranges from romantic to delusional. In the play's opening, Walsh chides Rose for laboring on a short-story collection for almost two years (that sounds about right, actually), when she used to bang out a collection "over the holidays" -- a notion so silly it doesn't even work as hyperbole. A mere four weeks after meeting Rose, Gavin Clancy arrives with a novel he has written about her and Walsh -- a time frame as swift as Dostoyesvky's legendary 28-day composition of "The Gambler" under the threat of creditors. And it was a novella at that.
With notions of writers this absurd, you almost can't blame the actors for failing to embody them.
And yet for all this, the show is still worth seeing, if only for Rosemary Cline, who is superb as Rose Steiner. She thoroughly inhabits the role, finding just the right droll, cynical tone, while leaving room for her enduring, almost irrational love for Walsh. Rose, we learn, is also a drinker, and not a particularly good mother, but Ms. Cline makes her utterly sympathetic. She even finds a way to elevate some of Simon's more tepid humor (which there is a lot of here), and the production really only sings when she is on the stage.
Luckily, that's for most of the play. "Rose and Walsh" was originally titled "Rose's Dilemma," and you can see why: The play is all hers. It's about trying to comprehend death, and finding a way to survive when love abandons you. Rose -- and by extension Ms. Cline -- lifts this half-baked material up onto her shoulders, managing to wrest humor and compassion from it, and turn it into something enjoyable, if not nearly profound.
