From the archive
This article was originally published on October 18, 2009.
Its being republished today on the occasion ofNeil Simons death.
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Simons wisecrack-laden comedies made him, by many estimates, the most commercially successful playwright of all time.
You couldnt get away from the man; he was even more prolific than hisCaesars Hourwriters-room colleague Woody Allen.
She got out of his play in tears and rage two weeks before the opening.
Audiences, for their part, never came.
Since then, near-silence.
(Something like: Has it held up?
They didnt have sushi 50 years ago.
You ate undercooked fish, you got tapeworm.)
He attributes his lack of stature to being popular; critics, he says, prefer the esoteric.
And hes partly right, although not in the way he thinks.
As playwrights go, Simon is a spoon-feeder.
Forget subtext: Its all bellowed.
The irrational and ambiguous have no place.
The characters are earthbound to a fault.
Although theres a sense in one or two plays that the world has gone meshuga, politics never intrude.
The social order goes unquestioned.
Sexual identity isnt in play.
Its just that the insularity, the sheer self-centeredness of Simons work, can be stifling.
No wonder his characters are so miserable: They think of little but their aches and pains.
On the other hand, insularity was Simons calling card.
Simon was retro from the get-go.
Thats not to say his plays are entirely comforting.
Theres anxiety running through them, often about real estate and the omnipresent threat of homelessness.
Poor neatnik Felix moves in with sloppy Oscar, because where else can he live?
Estranged parents have to bunk with their kids; estranged kids bust into their parents homes.
He allowed them to laugh at fears they might not even have been able to articulate.
He may have been our most successful playwright, but he was also our neediest.
In Simons universe, theres nothing more pathetic than a mamas boy whos willfully blind to his mothers disapproval.
Simon certainly wasnt.Brighton Beach Memoirsdepicts an overbearing, relentlessly critical mother who monitors every move in her house.
Harvey Keitel was dumped from the film ofThe Sunshine Boysand replaced with the more Jewish-inflected Richard Benjamin.
The playwrights two volumes of memoir suggest, for all their self-attention, an unexamined life.
Did this playwright ever notice other people long enough to be able to forget himself and inhabit someone else?
That said, his obsessive work ethic didnt go to waste: Some of Simons plays are genuinely boffo.
Oscar makes glorious messes hed give Simons mother a stroke.
We cut the line out altogether; he just gestured, walked to the door.
They wouldnt stop laughing.
Finally we had him go straight to the door, and they laughed at that.
Although most of Simons movies are stagebound and claustrophobic, his screenplay forThe Heartbreak Kidis stunningly good.
Simons underratedRumorsproved he could pull off the mechanics of farce no mean feat.
AndLost in Yonkers,though sometimes ungainly, deserved many of its accolades.
(That said, the cast of the new production is tremendous.)
It wasnt much of a play, but there was a live-wire feel to seeing it in process.
When that audience moves on (or dies out), the works dont evolve.
They remain a product of their era and place forever of their time instead of perpetually new.
