Female ‘Odd Couple’ old-fashioned, tired

You know the story about Felix Unger and Oscar Madison, the mismatched roommates who share an apartment in New York after their wives kick them out. One is neat. One is messy. They squabble and pout. And, eventually, it’s just like being married all over again.

That is the plot of “The Odd Couple,” which once was considered to be Neil Simon’s best play. So much so, that it spun off into a successful TV show and, 20 years after the original stage hit, Simon rejiggered the plot for a female version, a touring production of which was performed Tuesday at the Maine Center for the Arts in Orono.

Goodbye cigars and card games. Hello diet soda and Trivial Pursuit. Hello, too, to Florence and Olive, who fight the same fight as their predecessors – and with nearly all the same jokes, which, by the way, were hackneyed the first time around.

Clearly, the female version of “The Odd Couple” is not going to be labeled the best play Simon has ever written. In fact, for those who already disdain Simon’s one-liner humor, this script only turns the heat up more. Even those who admire Simon (including me) have to concede that this her-story is history. As in outdated. As in women don’t need to imitate men to experience freedom and fun.

But it’s important to acknowledge that it probably wasn’t Neil Simon who drew a nearly full house to the Maine Center last night. It was Barbara Eden, one-time star and magic-tossing heartthrob in the 1960s TV show “I Dream of Jeannie.” Cast as Florence in “The Odd Couple,” Eden was the drawing card, and she was the only cast member to receive an entrance applause. Yes, she still looks fabulous. And no, she’s still not much of an actor. But Eden, who is nearly 70 (she was born in 1934), gave a festive performance.

She also worked as an ensemble performer and didn’t steal from any of her co-actors onstage – as if one could steal from Rita McKenzie, who presented a muscular Olive. Georgia Engel, best known as Georgette on TV’s “Mary Tyler Moore Show,” was up to the same deadpan tricks she capitalized on so keenly as a TV performer. But unlike Simon’s aged punch lines, Engel’s shtick still works after all these years. Mary Pat Gleason, who plays a cop who is one of the girls, added spark to the action, too.

Just for the record, the audience seemed generally charmed by this two-hour-plus production, which ran for 10 weeks in Chicago and has a substantial road-tour schedule. Some (including me) may have found it slow-paced, old-fashioned and, at times, inanely cartoonish.