Last night I finally caught up with "The Odd Couple" at the Public Theater. Although I wrote the preview -- tellingly, an interview with artistic director Ted Pappas on why he had chosen such a familiar old warhorse to end the Public's season -- I was out of town when it opened, so the review was handled by Anna Rosenstein.

I was glad to see it, especially because of the acting, which is capable all around, especially by XX in the juicy little parts of the Pigeon Sisters. Several Pittsburgh actors did good work as the poker playing pals, and it was fun to see CMU grad John Scherer back at the Public where he once shined as Bertie in "By Jeeves," this time very funny as fussy Felix -- much funnier than Matthew Broderick was in the recent Broadway revival.

As Pappas said in the preview, it's amazing that this is the first time the Pubic has ever done Neil Simon, writer of some 30 Broadway shows and arguably the most popular American playwright of the past 50 years. It's long overdue.

On the other hand, there's a reason other Public artistic directors haven't done Simon: although undisputed commercial successes, many of his plays have little of the substance of art. Even when well-produced, as here, "Odd Couple" pretty well fits that description.

If Pappas had wanted mainly to redress the Public's neglect of Simon, there are a half-dozen other Simon plays that would better repay the efforts of a subsidized theater interested as much in art as entertainment. The BB trilogy ("Brighton Beach Memoirs," "Biloxi Blues" and "Broadway Bound"). "Lost in Yonkers," "Rumors" and maybe "Jake's Women" come immediately to mind. "Odd Couple" is a dependable laugh machine, and that's nothing to sneer at, but even this very capable production doesn't reveal any Chekhovian depths of character.

Or maybe it's just that it's been staged to death. A young theater friend who had never seen it before was astonished to hear how many of the jokes were familiar from TV sitcoms -- Simon influenced all the commercial comedy writers of a generation.

I hope it doesn't sound condescending to say that the Public's audience deserves something better. It's too good a company to put all this energy into something with so little payoff.