Neil Simon

Playwright

• Born: July 4, 1927
• Birthplace: New York City, New York
• Died: August 26, 2018
• Place of death: New York City, New York

Simon started as a comedy writer in the early days of television, then evolved into a prolific and successful playwright. His plays moved from lighthearted comic romps to tragicomic and touching family affairs.

Areas of achievement: Theater; entertainment

Early Life

Neil Simon was the second son of Manhattan garment salesman Irving Simon and his wife Mamie. Neil Simon’s brother, Danny—Simon’s only sibling—was nine years older, and the younger Simon looked up to his brother, especially after their father walked out on the family several times. The home became stressful for Simon when the family was forced to rent out rooms to boarders, so he would escape by going to movies. Often expelled from theaters for laughing too loud, Simon vowed he would one day make others laugh even harder. Graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School at age sixteen, a year and a half after America’s entry into World War II (1939–45), Simon enrolled in the Army Air Force Reserve training program at New York University. He completed basic training in Biloxi, Mississippi, an experience captured in Biloxi Blues (1984).

After his discharge in 1946, Simon moved into an apartment with his brother, who was working in the publicity department for Warner Bros.’ New York office. Simon teamed with his brother to write comic material for a review staged by the employees of the Brooklyn department store Abraham and Straus. Convinced they were comedy writers, and hearing that Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) writer and producer Goodman Ace was looking for new talent, they showed him a sketch and were hired to write for the fledgling medium of television. For the next seven years, the brothers wrote for television’s early comic stars, such as Phil Silvers, Jackie Gleason, and Jerry Lester, and for the Borscht Belt comedians of the supper clubs in the Catskill resorts, where Jewish people frequently vacationed. In 1953, Simon married dancer Joan Baim. When Danny moved to the West Coast in 1956 to be a director, Simon began writing for the pinnacle of early television comedy, Your Show of Shows, for which he won an Emmy Award the following year. He also wrote for Silvers’s Sgt. Bilko series, for which Simon won a second Emmy in 1959. After reaching the top of the television comedy field in short order, Simon decided to try his hand at writing for the stage.

Life’s Work

Technically, Simon had already written for Broadway, scoring a minor hit with the review New Faces of 1956. However, a traditional three-act comedy was something new, and it took him three years to write his first, Come Blow Your Horn, which premiered in 1960 and ran for a year and a half. He followed with a musical, Little Me, a showpiece for Sid Caesar in 1962, and Barefoot in the Park in 1963, which ran for nearly four years and 1,530 performances. It was still running when his next hit,The Odd Couple (1965), began a run nearly as robust (966 performances), leaving Simon with the unprecedented feat of having four plays running in the same season, Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, Sweet Charity (1966), and The Star-Spangled Girl (1966). Similarly, he had three hits simultaneously in 1970 and 1971: Plaza Suite (1968), Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1969), and Promises, Promises (1968). In the same period, Simon succeeded in Hollywood, writing not only screenplay adaptations for Come Blow Your Horn (1963), Barefoot in the Park (1967), The Odd Couple (1968), and Sweet Charity (1969) but also original screenplays for After the Fox (1966) and The Out of Towners (1970).

With The Gingerbread Lady (1970), Simon began noticeably turning away from the purely farcical to a mixture of comedy and pathos that some audiences disliked and some critics thought an improper mix. However, it was the first indication of a development that would bring critics both popular and academic to take Simon more seriously as an artist. The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1971) similarly modulated the comedy of a newly unemployed man grumbling at the foibles of modern urban life into the potential tragedy of a lost soul’s nervous breakdown. In The Sunshine Boys (1972) Simon continued the comic-tragic mix and offered his first examples of explicitly and recognizably Jewish humor, including what critic Daniel Walden identified as a re-creation of a Yiddish comedy sketch.

Simon’s next two plays dramatized works in other genres: The Good Doctor (1973), his tribute to Anton Chekhov, and God’s Favorite (1974), modeled on the biblical Book of Job. In 1973, Simon’s wife died. During auditions for The Good Doctor, Simon met actor Marsha Mason, whom he married later that year. He dramatized the challenges of finding love a second time in Chapter Two (1977). To some extent, Simon had always drawn his material from life, but the more extensive autobiographical style of Chapter Two led to the artistic and commercial triumph of Simon’s “Eugene” trilogy—Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), Biloxi Blues (1985), and Broadway Bound (1986)—followed by a play in similar style but with less sentimentality, Lost in Yonkers (1991), which won a Pulitzer Prize.

The success of Simon revivals on Broadway made new plays less necessary in the 1990s and the early twenty-first century, but he continued producing new material such as Laughter on the 23rd Floor (1993, a re-creation of his television years), Proposals (1997), The Dinner Party (2000), Forty-Five Seconds from Broadway (2001), and Rose’s Dilemma (2003). Rose's Dilemma, the last new work that he would write in his career, became infamous due to the controversy that surrounded its Off-Broadway opening. Reportedly, after receiving criticism from Simon, star Mary Tyler Moore quit the production and left the theater just before a preview performance. The following year, it was revealed that he had been on dialysis for some time and had undergone a successful kidney transplant, receiving the donated kidney from his publicist, Bill Evans. While a much-anticipated 2009 Broadway revival of Brighton Beach Memoirs came to a disappointing close just one week after its opening due to unenthusiastic reviews, his work continued to be revisited, including a Tony Award–nominated revival of Promises, Promises, starring Sean Hayes and Kristin Chenoweth, that ran from April 2010 to January 2011.

Simon died of complications of pneumonia at a hospital in New York City on August 26, 2018, at the age of ninety-one. He was survived by his fifth wife, Elaine, and three daughters.

Significance

Simon, a prolific and successful playwright, received numerous Academy Award, Emmy, and Tony nominations. The characters in his early plays were individuals realistically drawn but always generic, middle-class, ethnically neutral (with some minor exceptions) Americans. When his plays became more introspective and autobiographical, reflecting the Jewish American experience of the modern era, critics who had written him off as a populist gag-writer began to laud his artistic genius. A central element of that Jewish American experience in Simon’s plays is the importance of the family, even when that family is dysfunctional, as in Lost in Yonkers, or does not know how to treat aging parents, as in The Sunshine Boys.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, editor. Neil Simon. Chelsea House, 2002. Collection of excerpts from the best reviews and critical studies of Simon’s works.

Isherwood, Charles. "Neil Simon, Broadway Master of Comedy, Is Dead at 91." The New York Times, 26 Aug. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/08/26/obituaries/neil-simon-dead.html. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018.

Johnson, Robert K. Neil Simon. Twayne, 1983. Offers analysis of every major Simon work before the 1980s. Includes an annotated bibliography.

Kolas, Gary. Neil Simon: A Casebook. Garland, 1997. A collection of reviews and critical essays on Simon’s major plays.

Koprince, Susan. Understanding Neil Simon. U of South Carolina P, 2002. A thorough reading of all of Simon’s major plays and an assessment of their lasting value.

Simon, Neil. Neil Simon Rewrites: A Memoir. Simon and Schuster, 1996. Simon’s autobiography, with an intimate portrait of his life in the theater and a generous selection of photographs.

Walden, Daniel. “Neil Simon’s Jewish-Style Comedies.” From Hester Street to Hollywood: The Jewish-American Stage and Screen. Edited by Sarah Blacher Cohen, U of Indiana P, 1983. One of the earliest essays to recognize the importance of the Jewish American element in Simon’s comedy.