Simon’s `Pictures’ lingers> Northern Lights show frivolously thoughtful

On the surface, Neil Simon’s work may seem like a bevy of frivolous one-liners. You can almost always hear the ba-dum-dum after every joke, and even stage directors sometimes roll their eyes because they see a Simon play as less than serious theater. He’s prolific and popular, they agree, but that doesn’t make him important.

It’s true that Simon isn’t afraid to prescribe laughter as the best medicine for the pain and absurdity of human experience. Yet his insights about middle-class Americans in the second half of the 20th century have a poignancy and candor that is undeniably significant.

That’s exactly the peg director Kent McKusick hangs his hat on in the weighty production of “I Ought to Be in Pictures,” the story of Herb, a fallow Hollywood writer who gets a surprise visit from the 19-year-old daughter he hasn’t seen in 16 years.

Months ago, when McKusick, the artistic director and founder for the traveling Northern Lights Theatre, chose the Simon play, he, too, expressed an ever-so-slight apology about directing a work from the popular repertoire. After all, Northern Lights has a short but solid history of doing meaty works that leave you with a most delicious form of theatrical indigestion — that is, they saucily keep you thinking about the performance long after you’ve taken it in.

Yet “Pictures” is one of those hard plays that gives you the old one-two when you were expecting little more than a tickle. For instance, when Herb, played with alternating tenderness and bewilderment by McKusick, argues about relationships with his daughter, Libby, presented with manipulative sharpness by newcomer Josephine Brooke Harriman, he is asked to reveal what’s so scary to him about attachments. His one-line answer — “unattachments” — is quintessential Simon because it’s not only funny but frighteningly accurate in some universal way.

While Herb and Libby work to find some mutual sense of family with each other, Herb and his occasional lover, Steffy, are also positioning themselves in a chess game of love, commitment and fear of broken hearts. McKusick and Margaret A. Miller-Finch, as Steffy, interact with the pointedness and sympathy of longtime sparring partners. They threaten and dismiss and cut right to the bone with each other. Miller-Finch, whose stage work some theatergoers might admiringly recall from nearly a decade ago, has always had a certain nobility on stage, and she’s no shirker in this determined role. If anything, both she and McKusick could actually rely more on some of the humor in their lines.

More than other Simon plays, “Pictures” sometimes has a meandering quality to it, and if this three-person troupe wanes at all, it’s in these moments of rambling confessions. Otherwise, the cast has a manner of grace, confidence and naturalness that is both intriguing and inviting. These are often McKusick’s fortes, and this production is no exception to his discerning eye. He keeps the set pieces sparse and imagistic, and the acting hardcore.

Set in the newly established Playhouse, a dignified 30-seat theater housed in a storefront in Belfast, the production establishes a real connection with the audience. That’s precisely the effect producing directors Gardner Howes (formerly of the Belfast Maskers) and Mary Weaver are aiming for from this hole-in-the-wall theater. At Saturday’s performance, Howes alluded to three more plays being mounted there before the end of the year, and the success of “Pictures” proves he is off on a good foot.

In the meantime, “Pictures,” which opened in July at Marsh River Theater in Brooks, will be performed in Belfast, Greenville Junction and Bangor during the next month. And here’s a promise you can take with you to the show: Even the title will get you thinking a step beyond the obvious.

Northern Lights Theatre presents “I Ought to Be in Pictures” at 8 p.m. Sept. 5 and 6 at The Playhouse at 49 Church St. in Belfast. For information, call 338-3548. For information about other Northern Lights performances, call 990-2518.