Neil Simon’s Last of the Red Hot Lovers wears surprising well after nearly half a century, with the help of minimal, subtle updating of topical references.

Last of the Red Hot Lovers, by Neil Simon. Directed by Gus Kaikkonen. Staged by the Peterborough Players, Peterborough, New Hampshire, through July 20.

Beverly Ward as Bobbi Michelle and Kirby Ward as Barney Cashman in “Last of the Red Hot Lovers” at the Peterborough Players. Photo: Deb Porter-Hayes.

By Jim Kates

Neil Simon’s characters live in bubbles of self-centeredness that bump up against each other and bounce off or, every once in a momentous while, burst. The main task of the actors and director of a Simon script is to get past the bright situation-comedy lines and make us care about people who, most of the time, really care only about themselves. Because they’re continually talking past each other, rather than to or with each other, the dynamics of rapport have to be laboriously created, yet the audience must be fooled into accepting an improbability as natural: that these characters are taking in what each other is saying.

Last of the Red Hot Lovers plays out in three parallel acts, each discreet unto itself and yet building to a dénouement that is more than the sum of its parts. The premise is simple enough: Barney Cashman, a forty-seven-year-old restaurateur of settled habits, is beset with intimations of his own mortality. He decides, almost in the abstract, to step outside the boundaries of his marriage. His triple failure derives both from his own inept impermeability and from the separate self-centered bubbles of the women he bumps up against. In the last act, however, the bumping bubbles finally burst. Barney is egged on into owning up to his own humanity, his “decency,” and his love for his wife Thelma. As a comedy of conventional sexual mores, Last of the Red Hot Lovers wears surprising well after nearly half a century, with the help of minimal, subtle updating of topical references.

In the Peterborough Players’ current production, Kirby Ward’s nebbishy Barney changes emphatically with each of the women he plays against — all of whom are embodied by his own real-life wife Beverly Ward. (The triple role, if we were inclined to look for depth where little is to be expected, might lead us to suspect that the series of misadventures only takes place in Barney’s mind, especially because Mrs. Ward, at the end of this production, comes out for the curtain call dancing with Mr. Ward — Barney and Thelma after all.) Mr. Ward engages our sympathy for a character who is, on the face of it, mildly dense and gauchely unsympathetic. His characterization of Barney includes resemblances to well known actors, from Charlton Heston to Woody Allen (in an appropriately Allen-ish conversation about gloom and death), that nicely reinforces the figure’s vulnerable malleability. We see the middle-aged protagonist, like a teen-ager, trying on roles until he finds himself.

Beverly Ward revels not in malleability but versatility. Like Elaine Bromka playing the wives of three presidents for the Players last year, she has the benefit of creative costuming and wiggery (by the aptly named Betsy Rugg) to augment her considerable waggery as a comedian in serial performance. First, she gives us a superficially hardbitten New York broad — “Meeting on the sly is hard to do;” second, an unstable California showgirl aspirant; and third, a depressed suburban matron — “There are only indecent people and idiots in the world.” She fleshes them all out. If we are uneasy at all, it is with the realization that the playwright uses the women to lead the man to revelation. Last of the Red Hot Lovers is so very much about Barney — but the humanity Mrs. Ward brings to her last role is a restitution of balance.

Timing, timing. The particular cleverness of Gus Kaikkonen’s direction of the Players’ production lies in its timing — the director’s resistance to the temptation to make the cute repartee of the first act snap, crackle, and pop and to impose heavy significance on the last act. Instead, Beverly Ward’s first-act portrayal of Elaine Navazio is languid, even lingering. Consequently, Kirby Ward’s Barney does not get left in her dust, even as he muddles along with lines about his “sweet, succulent childhood in Sheepshead Bay.” So the last act, then, taken at a rougher, faster pace, feels more consequential, with Beverly Ward’s Jeanette Fisher livelier than her depressing lines would suggest. The second act is the trickiest because it is potentially the most dated, but Kaikkonen and Mrs. Ward tease the eternally contemporary out of Bobbi Michelle’s hippie-ish come-on.

The Peterborough Players have taken what I had thought of before as Simonian self-indulgent froth and given it gravity without heaviness. Without sacrificing the comedy, they have brought out the intended drama. Last of the Red Hot Lovers will change nobody’s life, but it actually may, as it does for Barney Cashman, help us think a tad more about life and love.

Jim Kates is a poet, feature journalist and reviewer, literary translator and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press, a non-profit press that focuses on contemporary works in translation from Russia, Eastern Europe and Asia.