REVERSAL OF FORTUNE.(The Odd Couple)(Third)(Theater Review)

"The Odd Couple" (in revival at the Brooks Atkinson, under the direction of Joe Mantello) is Neil Simon's enduring masterpiece, a textbook on comic construction, as streamlined and solid as the Pyramids. The curtain rises on a poker table, where one of four players is glowering incredulously at another, who is dealing very slowly. "Tell me, Mr. Maverick, is this your first time on the riverboat?" he says. The opening line tells us what the evening will be about: we're going to be reacting to behavior--all of it more or less bad. The card-game badinage also gives us some time to soak up the rank, smoke-filled atmosphere of the eight-room Upper West Side pigsty where the game is taking place--a sump of spectacular dereliction that is the natural habitat of a divorced sportswriter named Oscar Madison (Nathan Lane), who is currently in the kitchen whipping something up for the boys. Even before Oscar makes his entrance with a tray of vittles ("I got brown sandwiches and green sandwiches"), the audience knows the place, the person, and the problem: the sixth player, Felix Ungar (Matthew Broderick), is missing from the game. (He's gone walkabout because his marriage has collapsed.) The stage is set, so to speak, and the rest is comic gravy. But even gravy requires some attention. In this revival, surprisingly, Simon's feast loses some of its flavor. The problem, as always with cooking, comes down to chemistry.

Lane and Broderick, who were box-office magic as a comic duo in the musical "The Producers," were hired, reportedly at about a hundred thousand dollars a week each, to reprise the roles that were originated by Walter Matthau and Art Carney in 1965. From a commercial standpoint, since the limited engagement is already virtually sold out, the tandem's magic has worked. From an artistic one, however, Lane and Broderick can't claim the same victory. There's something essentially wrong in their casting, and it skews the play. The actors hit Simon's notes, but they don't quite capture the music of his humor.

The Oscar Madison described in the script is at ease in his body, the quintessence of loosey-goosey. "He seems to enjoy life to the fullest. . . . His carefree attitude is evident in the sloppiness of his household," the stage directions read. Lane, however, is not at ease in his body; his nerviness is part of his campy comic appeal. You can put him in sneakers, flip his Mets cap backward, and drape his portly body in an unbuttoned shirt, but, no matter how you alibi it, Lane still has the metabolism of a hamster. He is at home with the frenetic, not the athletic. (Although he picks up a basketball in one scene, you can tell from the way he handles it that he hasn't a clue what to do with it.) Inevitably, Lane is at his best when Oscar's infantile high dudgeon matches his own high-strung pitch. In the script's brilliant comic symmetry, Oscar and Felix, roommates forced together by matrimonial disaster only to become stand-ins for each other's former wives, end up acting out the very behavior that made them single. At one point in Act II, as Felix sits eating a neatly prepared plate of pasta, Lane's Oscar pointedly wipes his nose on the curtain, marches up and down on the sofa, tosses his cigar wrapper onto the carpet, and finally tells Felix to take the spaghetti and get out of his sight. "It's not spaghetti," Felix says. "It's linguine!" Oscar picks up the plate and heaves it into the kitchen. "Now it's garbage!" he says.

The nervous alertness that rightly belongs to the meticulous Felix has been usurped by Lane's snappy, Energizer Bunny performance, and Broderick has no choice but to play against the attack of his co-star. Here, Felix becomes the laid-back character--so laid-back, in fact, that he seems at times almost absent. Broderick's Felix is a round-shouldered, flat-voiced milquetoast, a depressed schlub who pads around the apartment like Jeeves with a towel over his arm, rather than the fussing, passive-aggressive "wife" we're expecting. The lack of animus in Broderick's sedate approach somehow lowers the heat in the argument and takes some of the lustre off the humor. ...