Is Neil Simon going soft? Or is the prodigiously industrious playwright tapped out? One hopes not, but his latest effort, "I Ought to Be in Pictures," an oddly muted comedy …, is, when all is said and done by its three characters, an empty and labored evening. "Shaky confidence" is ascribed to the middle-aged hero by his middle-aged mistress, and it also seems to be Simon's problem here. Teetering on the edge of sentimentality, this play about a father and daughter rediscovering—or discovering, really—one another after a long separation worries its subject all evening long, never daring to be either too funny or too caring.

It has been written and directed … and is acted with painstaking attention to detail and an almost solemn air of sincerity. But there is little evidence of enthusiasm in the writing, so that in the end we are only aware of contrivance and of characters who vanish from our consciousness like puffs of smoke.

Herb Tucker is a down-on-his-luck screenwriter living in a bright, cheerless horror of a cracked-stucco, tiled-roof West Hollywood bungalow with a single bedroom and a small plot of ground on which he has proudly grown an orange tree and a lemon tree, objects to which Simon glancingly attaches symbolic significance. Sixteen years earlier, Herb simply up and left his wife and two small children, a boy and girl, in Brooklyn (he offers two seemingly contradictory reasons for his action, but no matter), and within a month was settled in movieland.

For two years now, and after a couple of short-lived Hollywood marriages, he has been having a comfortable affair (on Tuesday nights only; in between, he sees other women) with a divorcee named Steffy Blondell, who has a good job as a movie makeup woman and two kids of her own. Steffy would like Herb to give up his ratty dwelling and move in with her, but there's that "shaky confidence."

Enter Libby Tucker, Herb's 19-year-old daughter (the orange tree), who has bused and hitchhiked her way west with the avowed intention of becoming a movie star, but actually to get to know and receive a sign of love from her dad, whom she has neither seen nor heard from since she was three. A spunky, plain-looking girl, she gets her wish and heads back to Brooklyn after a two-week stay.

We leave Herb at the typewriter, ready for action once more, as Steffy slips off to prepare a Chinese dinner at her presumably more livable house. Maybe there's hope for Herb after all….

The first half ends, by the way, with Libby reading from "The Belle of Amherst," Emily Dickinson's description of the loss of her father, a brief passage so moving that it doesn't belong in the same theater with "I Ought to Be in Pictures."…

One can sense the tone Simon is striving for in "I Ought to Be in Pictures," but it has eluded him along with any suggestion of genuine feeling, the result being a dead play.