Lundagård’s Mo Kudeki has seen The Prisoner of Second Avenue by Lunds studentteater. “A play about unemployment, crime, and mental illness may not sound like a barrel of laughs, but the script is full of fast-paced, snarky banter,” she writes.
Mel: I don’t understand. Someone walked in and robbed us?
Edna: You think they made an appointment? We’ve been robbed!
Life doesn’t seem like it can get much worse for Mel and Edna, the leading couple in The Prisoner of Second Avenue, performed this week by the Lunds Studentteater.
Forty-seven-year-old Mel has just lost his job and been robbed; and to top it all off, the thieves even took the liquor and the Valium.
A play about unemployment, crime, and mental illness may not sound like a barrel of laughs, but the script is full of fast-paced, snarky banter, and recurring jokes that keep the audience hooked.
Edwin Bywater and Cathrine Bengtsson have just the right amount of tension, chemistry, and energy, to pull off the hilariously hotheaded Mel and the calm yet sarcastic Edna, who never gives Mel a break in moments of insanity or paranoia:
Edna: The human race is responsible for the unemployment?
Mel: You’re surprised, aren’t you?
Edna: All the time, I kept thinking it was somebody else.
The costumes in this production were lovely, and really helped bring out Mel and Edna’s characters. Mel spends two acts pacing aimlessly around the set in his pajamas, robe, and slippers, while Edna looks polished and cosmopolitan in her sleek dresses and matching pumps.
Likewise, Edna really does have her act together – she finds a psychiatrist to help Mel through his nervous breakdown, finds a job so she can put dinner on the table (financially and literally), and comes home every night to her husband’s incessant self-pity.
“Want to hear about my morning? I looked outside three times…I listened to the radio…and I went to the toilet,” Mel complains.
Probably because the entire play is set in the living room of Mel and Edna’s 14th story Upper East Side apartment, after a few scenes I began to feel just as cooped up as Mel does.
Though not at all bored with the play myself, I began to sympathize with Mel’s ennui. Adding to the claustrophobia, Mel is in constant conflict with his offstage next-door and upstairs neighbors over who is being louder and more obnoxious. Luckily, in Act Two, Mel’s troop of four siblings come in and add a new flavor of comic relief, middle-aged sibling rivalry.
This breaks up what would otherwise be a solid two hours of old-married-couple fighting.
At some point, one realizes that Mel and Edna are prisoners purely by choice – no matter how miserable they become, they never seriously consider moving out of New York. Oregon, for example, is where “Unemployed lumberjacks are sawing legs off chairs because they have nothing to do.”
It’s as if nothing outside of New York really exists – a typical New York attitude which Bywater and Bengtsson deliver perfectly, matching their impeccable New York accents.
The Prisoner of Second Avenue runs every night this week until Thursday, so take an evening off from nation-hopping and check it out. You will spend the majority of your two hours in the theater laughing, but the play also leaves you with a slightly bittersweet taste in your mouth.
People are difficult, irritating, and often make the world an unpleasant place to be…but Edna and Mel show us that a good sense of humor is (almost) enough to survive the fight against the recession, mid-life crises, and the misery of city life.
