Neil Simon

Simon, [Marvin] Neil (b. 1927), playwright. The most successful popular dramatist of his era, he was born in the Bronx and educated at New York University. Early in his career he was a radio and television script writer, then turned to the stage by writing sketches for summer camp revues. His sketches were seen on stage in Catch a Star (1955) and New Faces of 1956 before finding success with his first full‐length play, Come Blow Your Horn (1961). After writing the book for the musical Little Me (1962), Simon then enjoyed a string of hits unparalleled in American stage history: Barefoot in the Park (1963), The Odd Couple (1965), Sweet Charity (1966), Plaza Suite (1968), Promises, Promises (1968), and Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1968). He had less success with The Star‐Spangled Girl (1966) and The Gingerbread Lady (1970) but had back‐to‐back hits with The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1971) and The Sunshine Boys (1972). From that point on, Simon's theatre career was a matter of hit‐or‐miss with some estimable plays in both categories: The Good Doctor (1973), God's Favorite (1974), California Suite (1976), Chapter Two (1977), They're Playing Our Song (1979), I Ought to Be in Pictures (1980), Fools (1981), and the autobiographical trilogy consisting of Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), Biloxi Blues (1985), and Broadway Bound (1986). His later efforts include Rumors (1988), Lost in Yonkers (1991), Jake's Women (1992), Laughter on the 23rd Floor (1993), The Goodbye Girl (1993), London Suite (1995), Proposals (1997), The Dinner Party (2000), 45 Seconds from Broadway (2001), and Rose's Dilemma (2003). Simon, a shrewd observer of human foibles and a master of the surprise one‐line joke, often makes remarkably effective comedies out of potentially unpleasant themes. Much of his success depends on these qualities, since his plays rarely offer major plot twists. While Simon's more serious efforts have met with mixed reactions, they usually employ the same skill and vivid characterizations. Many of his plays have been made into popular films, often with his own screenplays. Autobiographies: Rewrites, 1996; The Play Goes On, 1999.

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Neil Simon (born 1927) has become America's most prolific and popular dramatist. His tragicomic plays expose human frailties and make people laugh at themselves.

One of America's favorite playwrights, Neil Simon has been relieving audiences of their anxieties, fears, and worries by making them laugh at their own foibles for almost forty years. His portrayals of individual angst and dysfunctional family relationships, while exaggerated, manage to hit a nerve every time. Simon takes the audience through laughter to tears and back, as he explores life's emotional truths. A prolific writer, he has written and had produced more Broadway hits than any other American playwright, making him the wealthiest dramatist in history. Numerous Antoinette Perry (Tony) Awards and nominations, and special achievement awards have followed. His contribution to the arts and to popular culture in the twentieth century was recognized in 1995 when he received Kennedy Center Honors from President Bill Clinton. As part of his tribute to Simon the President said, "He has written a string of magnificent hit plays unprecedented in the history of the American theater. Audiences found them so funny that, at first, few people noticed the gentle, deep, and sometimes sharp truths behind the comedy…. We saw the flaws and foibles and faults, but always, through them all, the indomitability of the human spirit."

Marvin Neil Simon was born in the Bronx, in New York, on the Fourth of July in 1927. The Great Depression brought difficult times for the family. His father, a garment salesman, periodically disappeared, leaving his wife to support their two sons by working at Gimbel's department store and relying on family and friends. After they divorced, Simon lived with relatives in Forest Hills, in the Queens borough of New York City. Simon and his older brother developed a very close relationship, and during their teens wrote and sold material to standup comics and radio shows. It was his brother who encouraged him to pursue writing while in the United States Army Air Force Reserve program He attended college also at this time. His childhood fixation with comedy stuck, and he learned to write comedy by studying the work of his favorite comics-Robert Benchley and Ring Lardner.

After being discharged from the army, Simon got a job in the mailroom of Warner Brothers thanks to his brother who worked in the publicity department. They began collaborating again, and from 1947 to 1956 worked as a team writing comedy for television hits such as the Jackie Gleason and Phil Silvers Shows. Simon continued writing comedy for four years after his brother quit to become a television director. Some of television's top shows were showcases for his work, including the Sid Caesar and Garry Moore Shows. The pleasure was fading, however, and he turned his energies to playwriting in 1960.

Simon's first play, Come Blow Your Horn, was a modest hit; but it was followed shortly thereafter with Barefoot in the Park, a runaway hit that ran on Broadway for four years. His third play, The Odd Couple, introduced two characters that have become American icons-Felix and Oscar, two men estranged from their wives who move in together to save money, and find that they have the same problems living with each other as they did with their wives. The story lines usually presented conflicts between two people, and were filled with funny one-liners that brought the house down. While not entirely autobiographical, Simon makes no secret about using personal experiences or those of his friends for material. Come Blow Your Horn was about two brothers who moved away home and shared a bachelor apartment (just as Simon and his brother did); Barefoot inthe Park was the story of newlyweds adjusting to married life (reminiscent of his own marriage); and, of The Odd Couple Simon once commented, "[the story] happened to two guys I know-I couldn't write a play about Welsh miners." The Odd Couple had a two-year run on Broadway, won Simon his first Tony Award, and has been adapted to television and film several times.

Critics often belittled Simon's work on the basis that he sacrificed character and plot development for laughs, to the extent that some plays were hardly more that a series of one-liners. In the 1970s, he made a conscious effort to add depth to his work by treating serious issues within a comic framework. He presented tragicomedies such as The Last of the Red Hot Lovers, the story of a man in a mid-life crisis who seeks solace in extramarital affairs; and The Gingerbread Lady, in which a one-time singer, who is now an alcoholic, struggles to make a comeback; and The Prisoner of Second Avenue, which witnesses the nervous breakdown of a recently fired executive. Some applauded his new "real life honesty, " while others still criticized his characterizations as being superficial.

Simon continued to depict characters grappling to handle their feelings in difficult situations, and releasing tension with humor. He began to share more of himself and his life, including boyhood fantasies of escape from the emotional turmoil of his family, and the frustration and despair of coping with his wife's terminal illness. In a 1996 interview with Randy Gener for American Theatre, Simon commented, "I was writing plays that made people laugh. I wanted a response from the audience that would make up for whatever it was that was missing from those formative years of mine." For him, laughter provided a sense of comfort, fulfillment, and approval to replace insecurity, fear of abandonment, and later the futility of loss. During this period he wrote The Sunshine Boys, The Good Doctor, California Suite, and Chapter Two, whose leading character, a widower, feels guilty and miserable over falling in love and remarrying much as Simon had.

The 1980s took the intermingling of honesty and humor to new levels of intimacy. With the advent of Brighton Beach Memoirs, the first in a trilogy of semi-autobiographical plays, Simon develops the stories and conflicts among several characters, rather than presenting a one-on-one confrontation. The series begins telling the story of an adolescent middle-class Jewish American boy growing up amid a dysfunctional family and yearning to escape. Biloxi Blues, chronicled the boy's coming of age and the stunning reality of facing anti-Semitism while in the army -again mirroring some of Simon's personal experiences. The third, Broadway Bound, took audiences into the boy's young adulthood as he struggled to establish his career, and saw with new clarity the problems in his parents' relationship-Simon claimed writing the play was instrumental in resolving the relationship with his mother.

Simon uses writing as a coping mechanism for life's ups and downs, and explores a variety of mediums. When his third marriage broke up, he wrote Rumors, a farce, and Jake's Women, in which he introduces "ghosts"-good and bad experiences of two marriages and their impact on the third. Meanwhile, he has found time to write original screenplays, as well as many adaptations of his plays for the screen. His screenplays include: The Heartbreak Kid; The Goodbye Girl, which won an Academy Award nomination in 1977 and a Golden Globe Award for best screenplay the following year; Seems Like Old Times; The Lonely Guy; and The Slugger's Wife.

The playwright keeps pealing away layers of psychological insight. He began the 1990s with Lost in Yonkers, a painfully funny story of the long lasting impact an abusive mother has on her grown children. William Henry III, writing in Time, noted: "At the heart is … a mother who was physically and psychologically abusive and four middle-aged children who still suffer the weaknesses she inflicted in teaching them to be strong." In many plays the hardened protagonist has a soft heart underneath; not the mother in Lost in Yonkers. She never responds to the pleas of her retarded child for affection; she turns her back and walks out the door without a word-a poignant and sad ending for a playwright known for "schtik" comedy. The play was a success, and in 1991 earned both the Antoinette Perry Award for best play and the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in drama.

His next works turned back in time to reflect and reminisce about the days of writing comedy for legends such as Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and Sid Caesar. Laughter on the 23rd Floor is a far cry from the dramatic characterizations in Lost in Yonkers and Jake's Women. The play is a behind-the-scenes look at writing comedy by committee, as a group of men shout fast one-liners, each trying to top the other. While funny, critics had a field day talking about the lack of plot and depth of these characters.

In a similar, though much less superficial vein, Simon wrote a book entitled Rewrites in 1996. The book is a memoir of his early career during which time he wrote hits such as Barefoot in the Park, and enjoyed an extremely happy marriage that ended too early when his wife lost her battle with cancer. The book received mixed reviews; People Weekly commented that it "doesn't live up to the creativity it documents." As Simon has often found, his own work is a hard act to follow.

Simon continues to explore new terrain in his writing. In 1997, he further developed the ghost devise first used in Jake's Women, and introduced his first major Black character in Proposals. In an interview with David Stearns for USA Today he said, "It is one of the most loving plays I've ever written. There's also a lot of anger. Because love is the main theme in the play, I was trying to cover all the aspects of it-those who get it and those who don't." As President Clinton remarked when presenting the Kennedy Center Honors to Simon, "he challenges us and himself never to take ourselves too seriously. Thank you for the wit and the wisdom."

Further Reading

American Theatre, October 1996.

Newsweek, March 4, 1991.

People Weekly, December 16, 1996.

Time, March 4, 1991; December 6, 1993.

USA Today, October 2, 1997.

For more information on Marvin Neil Simon, visit Britannica.com.

(b. 1927)

1961	Come Blow Your Horn. The playwright's first full-length play concerns a Jewish businessman's relationship with his rebellious sons. It is the first in an unprecedented string of dramatic successes that would make Simon the most popular playwright of his era.
1963	Barefoot in the Park. Simon's second Broadway hit is a comedy about honeymooners coping with married life in their tiny sixth-floor Greenwich Village walk-up. Actor Robert Redford plays his first major role as the buttoned-down husband who learns to cut loose.
1965	The Odd Couple. The most enduring of Simon's early plays was inspired to answer the question "What's funny about divorce?" Simon's response is to create mismatched divorced roommates, the obsessively clean Felix and slovenly Oscar, whose interactions display the very characteristics that had led to their marital breakups. The play would be successfully adapted for film and television. Simon also writes one of his few missteps, The Star-Spangled Girl, about two struggling radicals in San Francisco.
1966	Sweet Charity. Based on the Federico Fellini film Nights of Cabiria (1957), the musical concerns a dance hall hostess's search for love and a relationship; it showcases the dynamic choreography of Bob Fosse.
1968	Plaza Suite. Simon's comedy links three one-act plays centered on the various goings-on in Suite 719 of New York's Plaza Hotel. They include a middle-aged couple's doomed second honeymoon, a producer's attempt to seduce his high school girlfriend, and the bickering of parents of a bride on her wedding day. Simon also supplies the book for the musical Promises, Promises, based on the film The Apartment.
1969	The Last of the Red Hot Lovers. Simon's comedy concerns a middle-aged married restaurant owner's bungled attempt to join the sexual revolution.
1971	The Prisoner of Second Avenue. After an unsuccessful departure from comedy, The Gingerbread Lady (1970), about a failed singer dealing with alcoholism, Simon returns to form with this dark comedy about a New Yorker's mental breakdown under the stress of modern urban life and eventual recovery.
1972	The Sunshine Boys. Simon revives the themes of The Odd Couple in the relationship of two retired vaudeville performers who try to set aside their differences for a reunion performance. The play would be followed by two failures, The Good Doctor (1973), an adaptation of short stories by Anton Chekhov, and God's Favorite (1976), a retelling of the Job story.
1976	California Suite. The playwright rebounds from infrequent previous failures by relocating the method of Plaza Suite (1968) to a California setting.
1977	Chapter Two. Drawing on his own experience of remarriage following the death of his first wife, Simon treats a novelist's relationship with a divorced actress. Many view the play as Simon's best.
1983	Brighton Beach Memoirs. Set in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, the play centers on Eugene Jerome, a young Jewish boy who dreams of becoming a writer. Critics consider this comedy-drama one of Simon's best, largely because his humor seems more deeply imbedded in the fabric of the family life he depicts with such authenticity and compassion.
1985	Biloxi Blues. In a continuation of Brighton Beach Memoirs, Eugene Jerome's dream of becoming a writer is temporarily deferred when he is drafted into the army. The play captures his army experiences and a comic effort to lose his virginity. Lighter in tone than the first play in Simon's autobiographical trilogy, it nevertheless portrays youthful ambition in shrewdly playful terms.
1986	Broadway Bound. The last play in Simon's trilogy, preceded by Brighton Beach Memoirs and Biloxi Blues, concerns aspiring writer Eugene Jerome, who is now on the verge of fulfilling his ambition by writing for the radio--but his life is complicated by family and personal troubles. Simon's adept character development makes his hero's ambitions arise naturally from the fully depicted social context of the post-World War II years.
1988	Rumors. The playwright describes this play as an all-out farce that treats marriage in terms of the gossiping that goes on among friends who delight in rumors of marital discord. The exuberance and deliberate caricature of a society full of rumormongers receives admiring critical notices but fails with audiences.
1991	Lost in Yonkers. Simon's play is about young brothers who live in Yonkers with relatives so that their father can get on with his career. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award for best play, and the Drama Desk Award, the play reflects Simon's most important period--eschewing light comedy and wisecracks, he pursues a more complex story line and a deeper critical probing of his characters.
1992	Jake's Women. The play depicts scenes in the life of a writer and the significant women he has known. Receiving mixed reviews, the play is praised for its expressionistic blend of realism and fantasy but criticized for its unsympathetic central protagonist, contrived happy ending, and tendency toward jargon-heavy psychologizing.
1993	Laughter on the 23rd Floor. Simon's play hilariously re-creates the atmosphere of early 1950s television. The scene is the writers' room of the Sid Caesar Show. Simon, one of Caesar's writers and a mainstay of other comedy shows, writes with nostalgia and sensitivity about this era. In the play a group of writers compete against one another but also share the joy of participating in a new medium that can still be bent to their will.
1995	London Suite. Essentially a deftly written farce, the play is about a famous actress who reconciles with her gay ex-husband. The plot becomes complicated when the ex throws his back out and remains immobile on the floor while all around him turns to chaos. Critics admire Simon's blending of sentiment and humor.
1997	Proposals. Set in 1953, as the Hines family vacations in the Poconos, Simon's play features an uncharacteristic outdoor setting and the playwright's first major African American character, the housekeeper Clemma Diggins, who serves as narrator. Receiving mixed reviews, the play manages only a two-month Broadway run.

Quotes:

"Don't listen to those who say, you taking too big a chance. Michelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor, and it would surely be rubbed out by today. Most important, don't listen when the little voice of fear inside you rears its ugly head and says. they all smarter than you out there. They're more talented, they're taller, blonder, prettier, luckier, and they have connections. I firmly believe that if you follow a path that interests you, not to the exclusion of love, sensitivity, and cooperation with others, but with the strength of conviction that you can move others by your own efforts, and do not make success or failure the criteria by which you live, the chances are you'll be a person worthy of your own respects."

"New York is not Mecca. It just smells like it."

• Born: Jul 04, 1927 in Bronx, New York City, New York
• Occupation: Writer
• Active: '60s-2000s
• Major Genres: Comedy, Comedy Drama
• Career Highlights: The Goodbye Girl, The Sunshine Boys, The Heartbreak Kid
• First Major Screen Credit: The Adventures of Marco Polo (1956)

Biography

As the most financially successful playwright in history, Bronx-born Neil Simon hardly needs TV and movies to enhance his reputation -- though at least one-third of his output has been geared exclusively to non-theatrical projects. Upon graduating from New York University, Simon began penning comedy material for nightclubs and revues, then signed on as a staff writer for TV comedian Sid Caesar. During his years with Caesar, and his later tenure on Phil Silvers' military sitcom "You'll Never Get Rich" (1955-59), Simon became skilled in the art of allowing jokes to flow naturally from the situation and the characters, rather than merely inserting gags arbitrarily for quick, cheap laughs. After an ignoble Broadway debut as librettist for the shortlived musical The Adventures of Marco Polo (1959), Simon scored a hit with his play Come Blow Your Horn (1961), which later became a successful Frank Sinatra film vehicle. Simon's first script written directly for the screen was After the Fox (1966), an uneven "international" comedy suffering from too many cooks (including star Peter Sellers and director Vittorio de Sica). Simon's next movie original, The Out of Towners (1969), was far more successful both financially and artistically. While his stage plays of the 1970s and 1980s were almost invaribly hits, Simon's film scripts of the same period fluctuated wildly in quality. There are few if any faults in The Heartbreak Kid (1972), The Goodbye Girl (1977), and Seems Like Old Times (1979). Conversely, Simon's movie-genre spoofs Murder by Death (1975) and The Cheap Detective (1978), while frequently uproarious, are little more than elonganted Sid Caesar sketches. And The Slugger's Wife (1983) is not only Simon's weakest screenplay, but also one of the worst big-budget pictures ever made. However, in the final analysis, Simon has hit the mark far more often than not -- in addition to his Pulitzer Prize for the 1991 play Lost in Yonkers, his scripts for The Odd Couple (1968), The Goodbye Girl (1977), and California Suite (1978) have been honored with Academy Awards. As he entered the 1990s, Simon suffered one major cinematic setback with 1991's The Marrying Man, then -- as always -- regained lost ground with still another Broadway smash, 1993's Laughter on the 23rd Floor. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

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