“The Odd Couple,” Neil Simon’s timeless tale of roommates with wildly different backgrounds trying their darnedest (and often failing) to get along, is coming to Iola this weekend.
This time, the story has a woman’s view in mind.
Teagan Kern and Monica Gayle Wright are the protagonists in the Iola Community Theatre production of “The Odd Couple: Female Version,” which runs Friday through Sunday at the ICT Warehouse, 208 S. Jefferson Ave.
SIMON’S play, about a pair of divorcees, has been recreated multiple times via the cinema, and the popular 1970s television series.
He also penned the female version, which sees a few subtle alterations, but with his trademark humor and madness still plentiful.
Kern and Wright strike a perfect balance on stage.
Kern is the lively, if not a bit slovenly, Olive Madison, a successful and quick-witted professional.
She is more than happy to entertain her friends with regular game nights, who are quite comfortable with her lackadaisical lifestyle. They are also unfazed when warned about green sandwiches she’s serving, which have “either very new cheese, or very old meat.”
(Side note: While poker nights provide the background in the original play, the female version revolves around Trivial Pursuit games.)
Olive also carries a bit of a soft spot, even to her ex, but especially for her friends, and she’s willing to extend a helping hand to a compatriot in need.
Enter Wright as the delightful Florence Unger, a fastidious homemaker/housewife who suddenly finds her marriage has disintegrated.
And as devastated as she is to hear her husband no longer wants to work on their troubled marriage, Florence also finds herself in need of an outlet to exercise her neurotic nature when it comes to housework.
Olive, of course, sees an opportunity for the twosome to help each other, and she invites Florence to share her apartment.
THEIR conflicting lifestyles, predictably, set in motion the crux of the story.
Kern’s Olive grows increasingly frustrated by her roommate’s pathological nature to clean anything and everything. (she even disinfects the Trivial Pursuit cards.).
“I can’t even have dirty dreams,” Olive declares. “You come in and clean them up.”
