The Prisoner of Second Avenue

Scenery: Interior

Mel Edison is a well paid executive of a high-end Manhattan firm which has suddenly hit the skids and he gets the ax. His wife Edna takes a job to tide them over, then she too is sacked. Compounded by the air-pollution killing his plants, and with the walls of the apartment paper-thin, allowing him a constant earfull of his neighbors private lives things can't seem to get any worse...then he's robbed and his psychiatrist dies with $23,000 of his money. Mel does the only thing left for him to do-he has a nervous breakdown and it's the best thing that ever happened to him...

"A gift for taking a grave subject and, without losing sight of its basic seriousness, treating it with hearty but sympathetic humor...A talent for writing a wonderful funny line...full of humor and intelligence. Fine fun."-New York Post

"Creates an atmosphere of casual cataclysm, an everyday urban purgatory of copelessness from which laughter seems to be released like vapor from the city's manholes."-Time