Barefoot in the Park

After a six-day honeymoon a new lawyer, who has just won his first case (6 cents in damages), and his young bride, who is as pretty and addled as they come, move into the new, high-rent apartment that she has chosen for them. But the difficulty is, in order to enjoy the charming character of this apartment one has to climb six wheezing flights to get to it. And not only that, but the apartment is absolutely bare of furniture, the paint job came out all wrong, the skylight leaks snow, there isn’t room for a double bed, and an outlandish gourmet who lives in a loft on the roof uses it and the window ledge as the only access to his padlocked premises. The situation is enough to break the heart and burst the lungs of any stylish young lawyer; and indeed it does, on the night he flatly refuses to join his wife in a barefoot walk through the snow in the park. She kicks him out, but he comes back – not for reconciliation, but because he figures that since he’s paying the rent she should be the one to go. Gillian Bagwell directs Barefoot in the Park, by Neil Simon.