Last of the Red Hot Lovers Playbill

Director's Note
One should never make one’s debut with a scandal.
should reserve that to give an interest to one’s old age.
One
– Oscar Wilde
When my Aunt Molly invited me to her 90th birthday party, the invitation read “please come to my
“special birthday” and I asked why she used the word “special” to which she replied “I have a
gentleman friend who doesn’t know how old I am”.
From the earliest recorded comedies, the central theme in comedy has been sexual infidelity or the
withholding of sex as in Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata” (411 BC) or the Roman comedies of Plautus,
Terence, Seneca, the Younger or Livius Andronicus. How does that play through the twenty-first
century lens of the “Me Too Movement” and the redefining of gender and gender roles?
Despite the fact that you’ll never hear the word “binary” or “empowerment” in this play, I find the
text amazingly current. The affair that Barney aspires to is less about sex and more to do with
mortality.
“Couldn’t I just once give in to my fantasies…I wanted to know what it was like with another woman…
a thousand questions that I’d never know the answer to if suddenly my name were in the obituary
column tomorrow morning.”
Our nation has lived through the sex scandals of our leaders from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump to the
point that it is no longer surprising. Why do people behave in a way that is hurtful to someone they
supposedly love? What are they looking for?
This production uses two comic actors at the top of their game to answer that question. We have the
same actor in three of the female roles to suggest that Barney goes out with the same woman over
and over again. Finally, he decides that his wife is the woman he wants in his secret fantasy room.
Neil Simon writes with wisdom and compassion. His brilliance derives from drawing characters based
on human weakness that informed the work of Shakespeare, Moliere and the lazzi of commedia del
arte.
After a year and a half of shuttering our doors, we could all use a communal laugh. It is said that
laughter reduces tension and lowers one’s blood pressure. The very act of laughing pushes one’s head
back and creates distance – we celebrate the dichotomy of distance bringing us closer together.
- Roy Steinberg, Director