The Prisoner of Second Avenue

by Neil Simon

Presented March and April 2009 at the Norway Grange

Sponsored by Grover Gundrilling.

Directed by Tom Littlefield.

Mel is a well-paid executive of a fancy New York company which has suddenly hit the skids.

Mel gets the ax. His wife takes a job to tide them over, then she too is sacked. As if this weren’t enough, polluted air is killing everything on his terrace; the paper-thin apartment walls reveal the private lives of a pair of German stewardesses next door; 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, the grit to survive.

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