A scene in “Jake’s Women,” the 1992 Neil Simon comedy-drama that Palm Coast’s City Repertory Theatre opens tonight, finds the novelist Jake harassed by his sister, Karen, and his psychiatrist, Edith.
So, how does Jake, whose rocky marriage to Maggie is about to crash down to earth like a hippo walking a tightrope, handle his tormenters?
“Jake calls Edith’s office on the phone so he can talk to the real Edith,” says City Rep director John Sbordone.
Huh?
Such is the world of Jake, whose discombobulating women problems would make Sigmund Freud abandon all his research and become a ditch digger.
Seems Jake’s marital woes have scrambled his brain synapses and jerked his heartstrings so that all of the significant women of his life – current wife Maggie, dead wife Julie, extramarital lover Sheila, daughter Molly, sister Karen and psychiatrist Edith – keep hopscotching across his psyche.
And so Jake, portrayed by CRT veteran Eric Bohus, finds himself in conversations and encounters – both real and imaginary – with his female relationships . . . and sometimes with several of them at the same time.
So, is Jake approaching bat-shit crazy, or is his novelist mind merely spilling out of his creative side and into his daily life, conjuring and rehearsing scenes for his next book?
“I think it’s much more subtle than (just being) crazy,” says Bohus, a Northeast Florida resident who appeared on Broadway in the Tony-nominated musical “Grand Hotel,” and who starred in City Rep productions of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Yamina Reza’s “God of Carnage” and David Ives’s “Venus in Fur.”
“Jake is so wrapped up in his work as a writer,” Bohus says. “In fact, one of the quotes in the play is that he keeps writing in his head like magicians turning a coin over in their fingers. So even though he’s in a conversation like I am with you right now, he’s still writing, as Maggie points out and bangs him over the head with.”
“This play is meta before meta was a thing,” says Hillary Walker, an area theater veteran who’s making her CRT debut as Maggie. “It’s very self-aware.”
Jake, Walker adds, is “a fourth-wall master” who “takes moments where he’s talking directly to the audience.”
Theater aficionados will note that such breaking-the-fourth-wall shenanigans, and Jake’s incessant casting of his real-life female relationships into “characters” in his mind’s eye, may recall the work of Nobel Prize-winning Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello, whose 1921 play “Six Characters in Search of an Author” was a groundbreaking absurdist, meta-infused work.
“Pirandello is a lot more obvious, and he’s serious at all times, but this Simon play is a funny show,” Sbordone says. “The humor comes out of the conflicts that Jake is constantly creating for himself.”
Alexandrea Lightfoot, an Ormond Beach resident, New York native and graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, portrays Jake’s deceased wife, Julie.
“What’s cool is you get to see the dynamics of how people influence Jake,” Lightfoot says. “His daughter – technically my character’s daughter, too – will say something I said. It’s all different pockets of perspective to get the same message to Jake.”
Lest audience members fear they will need a scorecard to keep track of Jake’s scrambled psyche and who’s real or who’s imaginary at any given moment, Sbordone notes that Simon telegraphed cues throughout his play.
Such clues “are mentioned constantly throughout,” Sbordone says. “When Jake is having a conflict with a character, they’ll say to him ‘Well, that’s your words – you’re the one who’s putting them in my mouth.’ It’s part of the comic device.”
Walker, a co-founder of the Daytona Beach improv comedy troupe Random Acts of Insanity, cites a recent scientific study that concluded “a percentage of the population does not experience internal monologues. That blows my mind! So, this will be a really great show for people who don’t know what it’s like to have an inner monologue.”
The cast of “Jakes’s Women” also includes:
Karen – Julia Truilo
Molly (at 12) – Isabella Bond
Molly (at 21) – Lillee Raymond
Edith – Bethanie Stillion
Sheila – Noel Bethea
–Rick de Yampert for FlaglerLive
City Repertory Theatre will stage “Jake’s Women” at 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and 3 p.m. Sundays from Nov. 1-17. Performances will be in CRT’s black box theater at City Marketplace, 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite B207, Palm Coast. Tickets are $25 adults and $15 students, available online at crtpalmcoast.com or by calling 386-585-9415. Tickets also will be available at the venue just before curtain time.
