Sarah Jessica Parker and
Matthew Broderick star in a
revival of Neil Simon’s
classic play Plaza Suite. By
Adam Green. Photographed
by A nnie Leibovitz.
Tr ue
Romance
ONE OF THE MOST EXPLOSIVE AND
sustained laughs I’ve ever witnessed in
a theater came during the first act of
Neil Simon’s semi-autobiographical
memory play Brighton Beach Mem-
oirs, starring a then-unknown Mat-
thew Broderick as Simon’s teenage
alter ego Eugene Morris Jerome. When
Elizabeth Franz, as his high-strung
mother, asked him, “What would you
tell your father if he came home and I
was dead on the kitchen floor?” Brod-
erick, with the precision-calibrated
comic timing that would make him
a star, replied, “I’d say, ‘Don’t go
in the kitchen, Pa!’ ” Now, 36 years
since that auspicious Broadway debut,
Broderick is returning to the New
York stage in a revival of Plaza Suite,
Simon’s tartly hilarious trio of one-
acts about hapless couples who square
off in suite 719 of the titular hotel,
costarring Broderick’s real-life mate,
Sarah Jessica Parker. It’s a marriage
of vintage comedy and glamorously
apt star casting that recalls a bygone
Broadway era—and may be just the
ticket for this fraught moment.
“It’s so great to be able to fall into
those Neil Simon rhythms, which
I’ve really missed,” Broderick, still
boyish despite a gray hair or two, in
a crewneck sweater and jeans, tells me
on a recent morning in a Midtown
rehearsal studio. “For me, those are
the comedic rhythms that I grew up
on, which are also the rhythms of
Carl Reiner and The Honeymooners
and Your Show of Shows.”
“But these plays are also very
human stories,” Parker, dressed for
rehearsal in CONTINUED ON PAGE 182
151
SET DESIGN, MARY HOWARD STUDIO
