Arvada Center’s sprightly production embraces Neil Simon’s 1960s comedy as a charming period piece.

It is a fascinating thought experiment: Would you walk barefoot in the park in the cold for the person you love?

If you asked me, the answer would probably be “no,” which would likely lead Corie Bratter to lump me in with the “watchers.” Fair enough. I am a theatre critic.

That question gives Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park its title during one of several blowout fights between newlyweds Corie (Katie Medved) and Paul (Cam Davis). Under Kate Gleason’s brisk direction at the Arvada Center, their marriage moves from honeymoon bliss to spectacular collapse and, eventually, compromise.

Katie Medved as Corie Bratter and Cam Davis as Paul Bratter. | Photo: Amanda Tipton Photography

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Simon’s 1963 comedy does not fit neatly into 2026. Its ideas about marriage can feel conservative, particularly its suggestion that lasting love requires each partner to sacrifice part of themselves.

Gleason wisely does not strain to modernize that worldview. Instead, she treats Barefoot in the Park as a period piece, allowing its dated assumptions to coexist with what still works: sharp comic construction and an observant understanding of how quickly romance changes once two people have to build a life together.

Paradise, six flights up

Six days after their wedding, Corie is moving the couple into a top-floor New York brownstone while Paul returns from his new job as a lawyer. Their apartment is freezing, the bedroom is tiny, there is a hole in the ceiling and everyone who climbs the five flights — six counting the stoop, as Simon’s script repeatedly reminds us — arrives gasping.

Matthew S. Crane’s scenic design makes the place wonderfully convincing. Cracked walls, exposed brick, hardwood floors and a split-level layout leading toward the bath and bedroom give the apartment the wear of somewhere young newlyweds might actually afford. Large windows reveal shifting skies, while an upper walkway eventually connects the Bratters to eccentric upstairs neighbor Victor Velasco (Gareth Saxe).

Jessie Page’s costume design adds another layer of period-specific pleasure. Corie moves from plaid pants and a bright orange top into a psychedelic explosion of pink, yellow and purple flowers. Victor arrives in a feathered hat, maroon striped suit and white scarf before later topping a sharp blue suit with a fez. Mother’s fur coat and tightly coordinated ensembles tell you almost everything you need to know about her.

Gareth Saxe as Victor Velasco and Katie Medved as Corie Bratter. | Photo: Amanda Tipton Photography

The first act is mostly setup, buoyed by Kevin Hart’s exasperated telephone repairman, JC Williams’ delivery man and Victor’s habit of cutting through the Bratters’ apartment to reach his own. Simon’s humor tends toward clever chuckles rather than belly laughs, and Gleason keeps the machinery moving.

After intermission, Crane provides the evening’s best visual moments. The previously barren apartment has been transformed with rugs, paintings, furniture, a minibar and Paul’s little law desk. Several audience members audibly gasped at the reveal.

Yet the hole in the ceiling remains.

So do the cracks in the marriage.

Cam Davis as Paul Bratter in Barefoot in the Park at the Arvada Center. | Photo: Amanda Tipton Photography

When opposites stop attracting

Corie believes herself a “doer” and Paul a “watcher,” though the distinction is more complicated. She craves novelty and motion; he is more comfortable with order and domesticity. Their differences become especially clear during Corie’s manufactured double date between Victor and her widowed mother, played by Cindy Laudadio-Hill.

Laudadio-Hill delivers the production’s funniest performance by consistently underplaying the joke. Her disapproving glances at the apartment while insisting she likes it are hilarious, and her exhausted collapse onto the couch after an adventurous night out is beautifully timed. Saxe makes Victor grandiose and faintly ridiculous, yet vulnerable enough to recognize that age is catching up with him.

Cindy Laudadio-Hill as Mother and Gareth Saxe as Victor Velasco. | Photo: Amanda Tipton Photography

Medved and Davis have the harder assignment. They must make a couple introduced in near-total infatuation plausibly reach divorce within days and then inch back toward reconciliation. Davis establishes Paul’s discomfort with the apartment early without making him humorless, while Medved follows Corie’s exuberance to its volatile conclusion as the evening unravels.

Their enormous fight is where Simon’s comedy becomes most interesting. Beneath the arguments over dinner, tossed law books and drunken insults is the realization that marriage has not magically changed either person. The apartment can be redecorated overnight; the people living in it cannot.

The play’s solution — each must bend toward the other — may feel tidier than contemporary audiences expect. Still, Gleason and her cast make the emotional journey credible enough that the resolution lands.

Barefoot in the Park remains unmistakably a comedy from another era. The Arvada Center does not pretend otherwise. By trusting Simon’s rhythms and leaning into the period’s visual pleasures, Gleason turns it into an energetic reminder that falling in love is easy. Figuring out how to live together is the harder part.