Sometimes a cook may use the best ingredients and equipment, exercise the utmost care and yet the resulting dish is only meh. That may be the case for "The Good Doctor," which opened last night at The New Jewish Theatre.
It's the recipe – or in this case, the script. It's Anton Chekhov by way of Neil Simon, an odd couple indeed. It's based on Chekhov's short stories – and as fine a scribe as Raymond Chandler believed Chekhov to be the best of all short-story writers. But how does that translate via Neil Simon. The result? A series of unrelated vignettes carried along by a nameless narrator, the writer, presumably Chekhov himself.
There stands David Wassilak, a fine serious actor whose comedic abilities always surprise me, here resembling a portrait of the first Joseph Pulitzer – although an internet search reveals he also looks very much like Chekhov. A beard, a pince-nez and cheekbones will do it every time. He leads us through the eight stories, talking about how he finds ideas almost everywhere he goes, and appears himself in some of the tales.
His younger self, and a host of other characters, is played by Aaron Orion Baker, whose ability to sneeze starts things off with a bang at a Moscow theater. Baker's chameleon-like talent works well here. Theresa Doggett owns the stage as a peasant woman importuning a banker who's under the weather. The banker, Jason Grubbe, is a charmer. And Alina Volobuyeva, shows excellen comedic timing in a piece about flirtation.
Director Bobby Miller, a guy who's forgotten more about comedic timing than most will ever learn, does his best with the script, but it's mostly stolid, lacking the zing of Neil Simon's best, or even his better, stuff. And Simon, to his credit, seems to know it, with his throwing in five-million-roubles closings when things move towards turgid.
Good work from all hands on a weak script.
The Good Doctor
The New Jewish Theatre
through October 20, 2013