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BY ANNA GRACE
Ryan Primm, Braden Coucher and
Rebecca Morus in The Good Doctor
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ARIEL OGDEN
Great Live Theatre!
Chekhov, Simon and
Slapstick
UO mixes unlikely ingredients for potent
Good Doctor
A
sparse, sepia toned stage greets
the viewer with the bleak message
“This space to let, inquire within”
stenciled across the playing space. Off to
one side sits a tall, wry writer who has
just stepped out the late 19th century to
join us for the evening. Over the next two
and a half hours, he invites the audience
into the unpolished world of his well-
worn notebook, featuring half-completed
character sketches set in situations so far-
fetched they must be real, blending humor
and sadness in a somewhat modern, truly
Russian way.
The Good Doctor is Neil Simon’s
vaudevillian adaptation of Chekhov stories.
Modern audiences know Chekhov for The
Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya and other
great Russian dramas, and Simon for huge
hit comedies like Brighton Beach Memoires
and The Odd Couple. Most people don’t
know much about vaudeville except as
some vague collective image etched on
the American brain, composed of slapstick
comedy and saccharine melodrama. As
unlikely as is this trio of Chekhov, Simon
and vaudeville, you can fi nd a solid staging
of it at the UO’s Hope Theatre. The Good
Doctor is a rare play that true connoisseurs
of the theater should relish the opportunity
to ingest.
The press release claims that The Good
Doctor is a Broadway hit with something
for everyone. A 6-month run in the early
’70s and a 1-month revival in the late
’90s doesn’t quite qualify as a Broadway
hit, but that representation is unfair in
other ways as well. The Good Doctor is
decidedly not commercial, exactly the
reason we are lucky to have a university
theater. Director Theresa Robbins Dudeck
helped her students pull meaning out of
the smallest of moments, like an ill-timed
sneeze or a postponed cup of tea. The play
can be completely nonsensical, but if I
was perplexed one minute, I found myself
laughing or even guffawing the next.
With the exception of The Writer
(talented Braden Coucher), each actor
played a series of roles, some over the
top, some sweetly real. I enjoyed everyone
and was particularly impressed by Jacob
King and Kathleen Leary. Rarely have I
seen a cast interact with an audience so
comfortably. It felt like the audience had
been invited in for the evening, and the
cast had an honest desire to entertain and
make us feel welcome. When an audience
member dropped a program or an errant
cell phone rang, an actor would help out
and pause the action until all was settled.
It was like the Reduced Shakespeare
Company, only nice.
In his refl ections, The Writer laments
that critics slay his work with the word
“charming”. He’s constantly compared
to other great Russian writers — and it’s
anyone’s bad luck to be publishing in an
age of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. When I
compare The Good Doctor to Simon or
Chekhov’s other great works, this one
turns out to be … charming. In the end, this
laugh-out-loud, slapstick comedy is a little
ew
sad, a little long and very Russian.
The Good Doctor continues through Jan. 30. Tix at
tickets.uoregon.edu/ut or 541-346-4363.
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EUGENE WEEKLY JANUARY 21, 2010 35