ACT’s production of Neil Simon’s “Prisoner of Second Avenue” is an excellent production with wonderful acting by all the performers. The only problem I had with the play is that it made me very anxious with Mel’s ranting and yelling at everyone and all the circumstances that have befallen him. He’s lost his job, and as a consequence, feels he’s lost his identity as a worthwhile man and human being because he can’t support his wife and college student daughters.

He’s so anxious, he can’t even tell his wife about the lay-off until three or four days after the event. In the meanwhile, he’s unable to sleep and on the verge of tantrums 24-7. He yells at the German stewardesses in the apartment next door because their music is too loud, even though his wife can’t hear it. He yells at the streets for the all night traffic noise. He yells at the public transportation system. He yells at the air conditioner that freezes their bedroom and doesn’t work in the rest of the apartment. He yells at the neighbors upstairs that he has awakened that yell at him. It’s a round robin of anger and frustration.

He lacks the ability to address his underlying fear of the future, his perceived loss of status and the frustration resulting from his inability to cope. Mel is a very anxious person and his palpable anxiety made me anxious. I don’t like to feel like that but I think that was the genius of the playwright and the actors.

The primary characters are Mel and Edna Edison (R. Hamiliton Wright and Anne Allgood.) They are typical New Yorkers: he’s an ad agency exec, she’s a housewife and they have two daughters in college. Everything’s OK and running smoothly until there’s a recession and he loses his job.

Did I mention that this is set in the ‘70s? Does the Boeing recession ring any bells in your memory? We had three young children and my husband was laid off then. In this current recession, one of our sons was laid off from a job he’d held for years as he progressed up the IT ladder. I completely understand Mel’s anxiety and it made me very uncomfortable.

Well, Mel has an emotional breakdown, recognized by Edna when she comes home from work to fix him lunch. (She’s taken a secretarial job to support them while he recovers.) The paranoid conspiracy-touting daytime radio and TV talk show hosts have pushed him over the edge.

Edna calls his brother and three sisters to see if they could help her get him into psychiatric care. His older siblings, brother Harry (John Aylward) and three widowed sisters Pauline (Cynthia Lauren Tewes), Pearl (Kimberly King) and Jessie (Julie Briskman) are all well off, and of course they assume that Edna’s called them to get financial assistance. She hasn’t, but is gratified when they do offer. But Edna would like to get Mel out of the city and proposes the purchase of a Vermont summer camp, thinking that quiet and working with kids would help him; however, all four siblings come unglued at the prospect of underwriting a speculative venture like a summer camp. They back out of the offer of help.

That fall, Harry comes back and tells Mel he’d joyfully buy the summer camp to help his brother, but Mel declines the offer. Harry leaves. In the next scene, Edna’s come home from work and the water is not running. All she wants is a nice, long bath and the water’s off! When Mel comes home after his nice long walk, she gets hysterical and he comforts her. She’s been laid off and now he’s the comforting, calming one.

I think Simon entitled the play, "The Prisoner of Second Avenue" because Mel felt trapped by city existance: by the rent in a "nice" building and the expensive though insignificant trappings of successful city life, by the endless bedlamic traffic and human noise that assaulted his ears and nerves and by the loss of his job that made him feel that he had lost control of his life and had become insecure and impotent. Then fear, anxiety and paranoia took over his life.

Edna had been the calm, rational one, until she was laid off as well; then she felt the same emotions he'd experienced. Fortunately, by that time, Mel had regained some composure and balance in his life and he was able to comfort her. Both of them had their prison term and would have to work hard to get release, which they did in their mutually supportive marriage.

Matthew Smucker’s set is the wonderful in-the-round design and execution we expect from ACT. The apartment has the ‘70s modish furniture and accessories that you’d expect from a middle class New York family. It even has a balcony, the mark of the upwardly mobile even today.

“The Prisoner of Second Avenue” runs through May 29 at Seattle ’s ACT. For tickets and other information, call the ticket office at 206-292-7676 or call at the theater box office on 700 Union Street , Seattle or go online at www.acttheatre.org/TicketsPlays.