The year, I think, was 1991. I was a junior in college, and I'd paid my acting dues. Now at long last, it was time for my first main-stage lead. My actual brother Richard and I were cast as the "Schneider brothers," Leo and George respectively, in Neil Simon's 1977 play Chapter Two. Rich was good. I was not. I regret to say there's video evidence to support this. I hadn't learned how to play a depressed character without losing audience engagement, so I trudged about the stage with downcast eyes. Richard's Leo got most of the punch lines anyway, so he stole the damn thing right out from under me. I'm not ... bitter.

Robert Alan Barnett, currently essaying George at Tacoma Little Theatre, makes no such mistakes. He wears a hangdog expression, sure, and Simon gives him plenty of unlikable things to say, but we root for him anyway. It helps that he and Kent Phillips are believable as brothers. (If Phillips's expressive voice sounds familiar, it may be from his ongoing radio gig as the voice of Bartell Drugs.) Leo is comforting George, mostly by setting him up on unpromising dates, after the death of George's adored wife. Matters improve when George meets an actress named Jenny, but in order to make that relationship work he'll need to get past some self-sabotaging signs of debilitating grief.

If this seems rather like a shaky foundation for a comedy, you're not wrong. For all its jokes, Chapter Two isn't a comedy. It's autobiographical, in fact, summarizing Simon's whirlwind courtship with Marsha Mason after the loss of his first wife, dancer Joan Baim, in 1973. Both 23 years ago and last night, I found George and Jenny's meet-cute scene on the phone a bit drippy, but the audience and my wife liked it. (The guy behind me chuckled the word "stalker.") Brynne Garman, so good in Lakewood Playhouse's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? two months ago, is attractive and sympathetic here. I dug Holly Rose, with her sexy Judy Greer vibe, as Jenny's unhappily married friend Faye.

Garman could aim her climactic monologue at Barnett instead of us, but the lines here are so on-the-nose that the scene might play even more like a very special straight episode of Will and Grace. The set design, by Curt Hetherington and Bill Huls, feels sparse compared to recent TLT efforts, though director Alyson Soma makes skillful use of a downstage sofa. Simon sets his script in a lofty Manhattan where everyone's a writer, actor, or press agent, a milieu supported by this production's bland adult-contemporary song breaks. I couldn't grasp why one scene's presented as a radio drama, but Soma's other, contemporizing tweaks work fine. The show gets laughs where it must, and everyone smiles and holds hands on the drive home.

CHAPTER TWO, 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, through March 30, Tacoma Little Theatre, 210 N. I St., Tacoma, $15-$22, 253.272.2281