Gorge Guide

"There are no jobs for 47-year-old men!” wails the newly and miserably unemployed Mel Edison in Neil Simon’s temper-tantrum comedy The Prisoner of Second Avenue.The plaintive cry elicits robust chuckles of sympathy during our own season of seething economic angst.

Mel is a well paid executive of a fancy New York company which has suddenly hit the skids and started to pare the payroll. Mel, too, gets the ax. His wife takes a job to tide them over, then she too is sacked. As if this weren’t enough, Mel is fighting a losing battle with the very environs of life. Polluted air is killing everything that grows on his terrace; the walls of the high rise apartment are paper thin, so that the private lives of a pair of German stewardesses next door are open books to him; the apartment is burgled; and his psychiatrist dies with $23,000 of his money.

Mel does the only thing left for him to do; he has a nervous breakdown.

It is on recovery that we come to esteem him all the more. For Mel and his wife and people like them have the resilience and the grit to survive.

The New York Times wrote: “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.”

This is Neil Simon at his best.