CHS PLAYERS OFFER `SUITE' PERFORMANCES

Cape Central's Red Dagger Drama Club has staged a production to be proud of in "Plaza Suite," opening tonight and continuing Saturday and Sunday in the high school gymnasium.

The '70s-era three-act comedy by Neil Simon gives audiences a chance to see a large number of actors and actresses in lead roles. Director Cynthia Wyatt, working with a cast of mostly untried performers, has uncovered some instant troupers.

Simon's play, performed here in the round, is held together mostly by its setting the same suite in New York's Plaza Hotel. The play is essentially plotless, but this is not Chekhov. It is more a comedy of mannerisms with some skyrocket one-liners thrown in.

To its credit, the cast plays to the heavily physical humor, especially Chad Reimann as the father of a reluctant bride in Act III.

Reimann's Roy Hubley is the quintessential Simon character, full of fumbling outrage at both the impossibility of correctly raising a child and the cost of hors d'oeuvres.

Reimann knows the comedic value of a cocked head, and his attempts to coax his daughter Mimsey out of the bathroom and down the aisle are flat-out hilarious.

As his wife Norma Hubley, Rene Robinson is an appropriate foil to Reimann's antics, nervously trying to avoid the blame for the wedding debacle of the century.

Amy Crosier as the bride and Jeremy Welch as the groom have thankless roles in the act, but Welch makes the most of a mostly two-word speaking part.

Act II, a reunion of high school sweethearts who have entirely different ulterior motives, gets physical in another way.

Matt Jackson plays self-absorbed, carnivorous movie producer Jesse Kiplinger to a fare-thee-well. As Muriel Tate, a housewife who's living in New Jersey with three kids, Kelly Russell is a giddy Hollywoodophile keeping track of her ex-swain's exploits through magazines.

He wants her in his bedroom. She wants something she doesn't have.

Jackson and Russell concoct a funny and smartly timed seduction scene: He kisses her neck, she asks, "Do you know Frank Sinatra?"

Also briefly in the scene as a waiter is Matt Tanner.

Act I features Amber Hopkins as Karen Nash, a middle-aged wife whose straining for humor slowly and not painlessly reveals her suspicion that her marriage is coming apart.

Andrew Trueblood plays her unfaithful husband Sam, whose midlife crisis has made him flab phobic.

"Nothing moves," she complains of watching him undress. "You're vacuum packed."

They are good together, Hopkins and Trueblood, she wavering between victimhood and scorn, he so used to faking it until he confesses, "I just want to do it all over again."

Natalie Boren plays Jean, the secretary Sam is dallying with. Robbie Felker has the role of a bellhop and Tim Arbeiter plays the waiter who might toast Karen Nash's revenge.