THEATRE + COMEDY

The Country Playhouse (voted through Houston Community Newspapers as Best Community Theatre of 2010) presents Neil Simon’s The Prisoner of Second Avenue, running from November 5 to 20 on the Cerwinske Stage, directed by Daniel Polk.

One of the most popular of American dramatists, Neil Simon is known for comedies that more often than not examine the tensions that can arise among family members or between men and women living in New York. In The Prisoner of Second Avenue his comedy turns darker as he explores the effect that city life can have on a no-longer-young couple. It takes place over the period from mid-summer to December in the early 1970’s, when New York City was beset by financial problems, a high crime rate and strikes that made daily life often inconvenient and sometimes dangerous.

Mel Edison is a well-paid executive of a high-end Manhattan firm that has hit the skids and he gets let go. His wife Edna takes a job to tide them over but she too loses her job. Compounded by the air-pollution killing his plants and the paper-thin walls of the apartment allowing a constant reality show of his neighbors' private lives, things couldn’t possibly get any worse – then he's robbed and his psychiatrist dies with $23,000 of his money. The Prisoner of Second Avenue chronicles Mel and Edna’s struggle to survive city life while maintaining a measure of dignity in the process – enough to bring on a nervous breakdown!

"A gift for taking a grave subject and, without losing sight of its basic seriousness, treating it with hearty but sympathetic humor...A talent for writing a wonderful funny line...full of humor and intelligence. Fine fun."-New York Post

"Creates an atmosphere of casual cataclysm, an everyday urban purgatory of ‘copelessness’ from which laughter seems to be released like vapor from the city's manholes."-Time