On Stage & Screen:
Whatever Simon Says,
He’s Just Plain Funny

By Jonathan Spencer

In December 1995, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in their annual Kennedy Center Honors TV broadcast, celebrated the life achievements of five American masters of the performing arts: dancer/choreographer Jacques d'Amboise, opera diva Marilyn Horne, jazz great B.B. King, actor Sidney Poitier, and most notably, for our purposes, playwright Neil Simon.

Traditionally on the program, each honoree receives a tribute from his or her peers.  When the time came for Simon to be so honored, three performers took the stage – Nathan Lane, Christine Baranski and Sid Caesar (for whom Simon worked as a staff writer on the legendary TV variety program Your Show of Shows).  Lane and Baranski, in turn, read selected comic monologues from Simon’s plays.  But each time Caesar’s turn came around, the veteran comedian launched into a hilarious stream of pseudo-foreign dialect (first French, then Italian, and finally German), praising Simon’s career.  The audience roared.  But no one was more entertained than Simon.  He was laughing so hard that he had to remove his glasses to wipe away the tears.

At that moment, I understood Neil Simon better than I ever had before. Not only is he the bard of New York and the American master of character-based comedy.  He is also the perfect audience.  In other words, he is having just as much, if not more, fun than we are.

So let’s take a look at the course of Simon’s career and see what he thinks is so darn funny.

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Simon had developed a pretty good résumé in the early days of TV, writing for the likes of comedians Sid Caesar and Phil Silvers, so a transition to Broadway wasn’t entirely out of the question. He broke in as a sketch contributor to popular reviews such as New Faces of 1956 and as book writer for the 1962 Cy Coleman musical Little Me (starring Caesar).  His first full play, Come Blow Your Horn (1961), was a moderate success, running for 677 performances, and explored some of the basic themes that would become his trademarks – the pressures of family, life in New York, and the difficulties of living together in close proximity -- but it was his next effort in which Simon found his voice and earned his first solo commercial success.

Barefoot in the Park (1963), directed by Mike Nichols, chronicled the trials and tribulations of Paul and Corrie Bratter, a pair of newlyweds who had just moved into a very small apartment in Greenwich Village.  Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley played the young couple and Mildred Natwick played Corrie’s witty mother. The show ran for nearly four years, racking up 1,530 performances, and was adapted by the author into a popular movie starring Redford and Jane Fonda.  Simon has said that this play was based on his first marriage to his wife Joan, who later died in 1973.

In 1965, Simon followed up this hit with what was to become his signature work, The Odd Couple, again directed by Nichols and starring Walter Matthau and Art Carney in the title roles.  The play (which is discussed at length elsewhere in this edition of the Willows Review) ran for 966 performances and was the recipient of Tony awards for Simon, Nichols and Matthau.  The following year saw two more of his efforts hit the stage: the Cy Coleman musical Sweet Charity starring Gwen Verdon (for which Simon wrote the book) and The Star-Spangled Girl, a comedy about romance and 1960s radicalism starring Richard Benjamin, Anthony Perkins and Connie Stevens.  Though the latter was deemed a flop, it should be noted that during the 1966-67 season, four Simon plays were running simultaneously on Broadway.

In 1968, Simon teamed with Nichols again on Plaza Suite, a trio of one acts all set in the same suite at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel. The cast included George C. Scott and Maureen Stapleton. It ran 1,097 performances and earned a Tony for Nichols – and gave Simon a structural formula that he would revisit from time to time. Later that same year, he would have similar success with his book for the Burt Bacharach-Hal David musical Promises, Promises, an adaptation of the Billy Wilder film The Apartment. The show featured a Tony-winning performance by Jerry Orbach as the single guy who lends his apartment to his married co-workers for their affairs – until he discovers that one of them is seeing the girl he loves. It ran for over 1,200 performances.

A string of comedies followed, all on the theme of dealing with failure: The sexual revolution is at the center of The Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1969), in which middle-aged Barney Cashman (James Coco), still married to his high school sweetheart, yearns to have just one extra-marital fling in his tranquil marriage before life passes him by. But he finds adultery is hard work, especially if you have to use your mother’s empty apartment as your love nest. The Gingerbread Lady (1970), a personal favorite of Simon’s, added a serious layer to the laughter. Maureen Stapleton won a Tony for her portrayal of an alcoholic nightclub singer who returns from rehab to start her life over again, supported by her equally precarious friends and a devoted teenage daughter. And The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1971) appears to be a tip of the hat to the ultimate examination of failure in America, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Set during a sweltering summer in New York, the play scrutinizes Mel Edison (Peter Falk) as he deals with the sudden loss of his job, his obnoxious neighbors, a garbage strike, and the fact that his wife Edna (Lee Grant) is going back to work. One of Simon’s darker-humored efforts, it pushed the limits of a comedic protagonist’s likeability to the edge.

To this trio, one could add 1972’s The Sunshine Boys, Simon’s meditation on failed friendship. Willie and Al (Jack Albertson and Sam Levene) are two aging vaudevillians who grew to hate each other over the years of their partnership and eventually reached a point where they didn’t speak to each other off-stage. When offered the opportunity to perform their old act on TV, they are forced to learn how to get along with each other. More than just a character study, this play was also a lesson in the craft of comedy-making. The men feud over the details of their act, from the exact placement of a chair in one of their skits to the exact placement of the letter “k” in a joke (Punch lines should have the letter "k" in them, Willie explains: "That's why 'Casey Stengel' is funny and 'Robert Taylor' is not").

Simon’s wife Joan died in 1973 and the plays he produced over the next three years -- The Good Doctor (a fond salute to Anton Chekhov’s early short stories); God's Favorite (a modern retelling of the story of Job); and California Suite (the Plaza Suite formula shifted 3,000 miles westward) -- were received with less than the usual enthusiasm associated with Simon’s plays. But The Good Doctor would hold the key to a comeback – it featured an actress named Marsha Mason, whom Simon would court and marry. The end result was Chapter Two (1977), an admittedly autobiographical work on dealing with the death of a loved one and learning to move on with a new relationship. 

The next chapter of Simon on Broadway was marked by both ups and downs. On the upside:  They're Playing Our Song, a musical collaboration with Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager; on the downside: I Ought to Be in Pictures; Fools; and a revised version of Little Me. But in the wings, he was readying an autobiographical series of plays that would refocus his career and elevate his work from popular and successful to critically lauded.

Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), Biloxi Blues (1985) and Broadway Bound (1986) – the so-called Eugene Trilogy -- chronicled Simon’s stormy childhood, his brief time in the Army, and the beginning of his career in television. Guided by narrator Eugene Morris Jerome (played by Matthew Broderick in the first two plays and Jonathan Silverman in the third), Simon charted a seriocomic course – from coming-of-age story to a dark examination of his parents’ failed marriage -- that resonated with both audiences and critics alike. Brighton Beach ran for nearly 1,300 performances and garnered a Tony for Broderick and director Gene Saks; Biloxi Blues won Tonys for Saks, actor Barry Miller and Best Play. And Broadway Bound earned Tonys for actors Linda Lavin and John Randolph. Critics agreed that Simon had finally managed to meld the comic and the tragic into a cohesive and believable whole.

After a brief but refreshing diversion into farce (1988’s Rumors), Simon returned to his own experience for the semi-autobiographical Lost in Yonkers (1991).  Set during WWII, the story concerns two young brothers who are left in Yonkers, NY, by their desperate father so that he can travel the country in order to pay off his debts. The boys are placed in the hands of their grandmother, a severe, intimidating immigrant woman who terrified her surviving children into the shells they occupy today. As the two brothers learn to live with her, as well as get to know their uncle and aunts, they ultimately come into their own. The show won a fistful of Tonys including Best Play, Best Actress (Mercedes Ruehl), Best Featured Actor (Kevin Spacey), and Best Featured Actress (Irene Worth). And to cap it off, Yonkers was honored with the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an achievement Simon had been convinced was beyond him.

The late 1990s and early 2000s saw a return to old forms, some successful, some not -- Jake’s Women (a writer grapples with a failing marriage); The Goodbye Girl (a musical version of his hit screenplay); Laughter on the 23^rd Floor (a salute to his Sid Caesar writing days); and London Suite (sound familiar?); among others. And like all successful theatrical careers in their late stages, revivals (Sweet Charity, Little Me, Sunshine Boys, Odd Couple and Barefoot in the Park) began to pop up with abandon.

So, as Simon’s career winds down, what can be said about his prolific career?  The darker (and more mature) side of his work was surely informed by his admittedly stormy upbringing.  And there must be some form of obsessive behavior behind such theatrical drive.  After all, if you total up his contributions to the American theater, then add in his screenplays, both adaptive of his own Broadway canon (Odd Couple, Sunshine Boys, Plaza/California Suites, the Eugene Trilogy, etc.) and original works for the screen (The Out-of-Towners, Heartbreak Kid, Murder By Death, The Goodbye Girl; The Cheap Detective, etc.), the sheer tonnage of it all is astounding.  But the fact that so much of it is memorable, affecting, commercially successful, and downright funny is even more stunning.