Rose's Dilemma

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According to some reports, Neil Simon blamed Mary Tyler Moore for not getting laughs in his Rose's Dilemma and thus hastened her pre-opening departure from the Manhattan Theatre Club's production of the play. If that's the case, then the former owes the latter an abject apology. There are disappointingly few laughs for an actor to get in this wistful new work.

Much of the proof is in Patricia Hodges's performance. As playwright/novelist Rose Steiner, who's haunted by her five-years-dead novelist lover and unable to write because of an inability to move on, Hodges works like a trouper to vivify Simon's lines. But the dialogue she and colleagues speak does something that's apparently possibl[...]