Love, marriage, and Marsha Mason

Neil Simon's Chapter Two, a 1976 Broadway hit and tribute to the romantic fortitude of the playwright's second wife, Marsha Mason, finds itself at the Bucks County Playhouse for yet another chapter. The twist this time is that Mason directs the story of her own marriage and the role that, for its film adaptation costarring James Caan, won her an Academy Award nomination.

The pair met within a year of Simon's first wife's death from cancer, while Mason was licking her wounds from a divorce; they wed after a courtship of three weeks. The play, a comic dramatization of the struggle to come to terms with their losses, love, and the realization that they might have leaped without looking, resonates, even if it's taken on a whiff of stale air.

There's an acuteness of emotion in this script that's still raw, but has classic Simon nimbleness. When things start to get rough for our Simon/Mason avatars, writer George Schneider (Joey Slotnick) and actress Jennie Malone (Anastasia Griffith), Simon changes the subject and shifts to Jennie's apartment, for hijinks between Jennie's best friend, Faye (Nadia Bowers), and George's brother Leo (Michael Nathanson), both unhappily married.

Bowers and Nathanson provide some of the show's easiest moments, a comic pair whose neuroses are as mismatched as their appearance: a lissome blonde who's a good person at heart, and a stocky, swarthy guy who probably isn't. The chemistry between Slotnick and Griffith is trickier. They're stiff together and comfortable apart, which creates a problem if you're convincing an audience this is a love worth the battle.

The production updates some scripted elements without touching others. Jennie plugs in an iPhone and mentions the BP oil spill, and Bobby Frederick Tilley's costumes, particularly on the women, show loose, layered, contemporary sophistication. Yet they all chatter about their "analysts," Leo refers to the "morning papers," and Mason's direction has a stagy, edgeless quality, dated in an anxiety-filled post-9/11, post-financial crisis New York. It might have worked better as a period piece - the speechifying wouldn't seem so anachronistic. Still, the struggle at the play's core, the desperation with which two people try, despite all odds, to forge a connection, remains timeless.