Teen actors show young love is no walk in the park

There are many things that can cause a marriage to crumble.

For newlyweds Paul and Corie Bratter of Neil Simon’s celebrated 1963 comedy, “Barefoot in the Park,” it starts with five things — or maybe six, depending on whether you count the front stoop of their apartment building.

The Riverdale Community Center Teen Theater staged its final production of the award-winning play at the David A. Stein Riverdale/Kingsbridge Academy (M.S./H.S. 141) on Nov. 21. In the show, a chirpy Corie Bratter (Cassandra Hernandez, 17) is so excited to start her new life with her husband, Paul Bratter — played unerringly by Julian Bar-Illan, 19, — that she turns a blind eye to the nuisances of their first apartment, including its grueling fifth-floor walk-up.

Still, the five flights might as well have been mountains. The trek has the telephone repairman (Tyttus Douglas, 17), deliveryman (Fitsum Ghebrtencea, 17) and Corie’s mother Mrs. Banks (Emily Isabel, 16) staggering, huffing and puffing as if they had just completed the New York City Marathon.

In fact, it is no wonder that an out-of-breath Mrs. Banks jokes upon entering the apartment, “If I’d known the people on the third floor, I’d have gone to visit them.”

But there are other complications with the couple’s abode: There is no bathtub, the radiator is the “coldest thing” in their flat, a broken skylight delivers brisk winds and snow and an eccentric neighbor insists on exiting their apartment through a window in their bedroom. 

Cassandra Hernandez plays the role of Corie Bratter wonderfully, with the kind of fizzy and sunny defiance that provides comical turbulence to Paul’s tense, no-nonsense demeanor. The two are polar opposites and the duo does a lovely job of showing each other’s shortcomings. 

Corie acts before thinking, the prime example being the time she walked barefoot in the park. Paul, on the other hand, is inflexible. A suited-up, practical lawyer, you would not catch him loosening up, let alone undoing his tie.