You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover and you shouldn’t judge a play by its first scene ... or the initial number of people in the audience. Despite a sparse audience and a rocky beginning, Risley Theater’s production of The Odd Couple ended like too few of the relationships in this play: a success.

The Odd Couple is a play by Neil Simon about two male divorcees living as roommates. Marge, a womanizer and a slob, (in most productions known as Oscar, but changed here to reflect a gender neutral production) invites Felix, a socially inept neurotic, to live with him after Felix’s wife leaves. But an act of kindness soon turns into a disaster when their differences unfold and their relationship oddly begins to resemble a failing marriage. At times funny, the play is more often dark, as the possibility of Felix committing suicide always lurks beneath comic tensions.

But Felix’s neurosis wasn’t the only tension in the production. Felix and Marge’s friends who visit for weekly poker games rarely get along and are nearly as “odd” a group as the titular odd couple itself. The play opens to these friends at Marge's house for the weekly ritual. As they talk about things as mundane as pretzels to topics as serious as the recent separation of an, at this point, unidentified friend and his wife, the friends participate in a game of sparring words that has nothing to do with poker. But the intended distance between these characters is matched by an aloofness between the cast and audience, as the characters were initially difficult to distinguish from one another. While the audience is supposed to be wondering why these characters cannot connect to each other, they are instead wondering why they cannot connect to these characters.

The performances by Daniel Burns ’13 as Felix and Jen Pierre ’13 as Marge, however, recovered the first act and tighter performances soon followed from tenser scenes. By the second act, Burns and Pierre had developed a hilariously dark chemistry and the rest of the cast began to match their energy. Kerry Pinnisi ’11 and Julia Rizzo ’11, playing Marge and Felix’s two beautiful British neighbors, energized the stage and brought the most laughs of the evening when Marge invites them over for a double date.

Whether the characters are married, divorced or playing a poker game, does not seem to make a difference in The Odd Couple. Whatever the case, characters are unable to connect and almost always make each other miserable. The play suggests that marriages don't end in divorce because they go from good to bad; they are always bad, and one day people just realize it. It is this dim realization which the play ends on as Marge and Felix “break up” and Felix moves out.

But while the marriages are consistently bad from beginning to end, Risley’s production of The Odd Couple improved over the small spans of time of this short play. It is difficult to connect to an audience when your characters can barely connect to one another, a challenge which the cast discovered from the first scene onwards. But, by the end of the play they had discovered a way to reach out to the audience with their flawed sense of humanity (and a few laughs) to present a couple hours in the life of The Odd Couple.