A quarter century after his first full-length work appeared on Broadway, Neil Simon at last is moving from the status of a commercial success to a classic playwright.
He has always been a good writer of fast, funny comedies. ”The Odd Couple,” for example, produced 21 years ago, is going to be remembered and performed to audience delight long after many another Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award drama is forgotten.
Good or mediocre, most of Simon`s plays also have been good box office. He still holds the record for having the most plays running simultaneously on Broadway (four); and even some of his minor, sour offerings, such as ”The Prisoner of Second Avenue,” have achieved hit status in a market that relies ever more heavily on comedies and musicals to sell tickets.
Anachronistically, in this era of nonprofit theater, Simon has become a millionaire playwright the old-fashioned way. With few exceptions, he has taken his shows through the traditional commercial route of the American theater, opening them out of town for a few weeks for a concentrated period of refining and rewriting and then bringing them directly to Broadway.
This year, however, may be the biggest yet in Simon`s career, justly giving him the most popular and critical acclaim of his life.
The key element in this season of Simon is ”Broadway Bound,” the final work of the autobiographical trilogy into which the playwright clearly has poured his heart and soul. Coming at a time when some of Simon`s comedies seemed mechanical and predictable, this personal trio has given his writing a startling rebirth.
Simon`s life has provided material for his plays in the past, including
”The Odd Couple” (about the days when he roomed with his brother, Danny)
and ”Chapter Two” (about his second marriage); but the trilogy, which focuses on a period of roughly a dozen years in his youth and early manhood, before his career as a writer had been established, achieves both a tenderness and toughness that had been lacking in even Simon`s most successful plays.
Beginning in 1983 with ”Brighton Beach Memoirs,” and continuing with
”Biloxi Blues” (playing here at the Shubert Theatre in a touring production through Nov. 22), Simon has been charting the progress into manhood of his theatrical alter ego, Eugene Morris Jerome. Starting out as a 15-year- old kid in Brooklyn in 1937, Eugene moved several steps forward in his rites of passage in ”Biloxi Blues” when he left home in 1943 to enter Army basic training in World War II. In ”Broadway Bound”–which opens in New York Dec. 4 at the Broadhurst Theatre after its current tryout run at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C.–the play ends with Eugene leaving home once and for all and going off into the world on his own.
Eugene Morris Jerome has become a man, and, in completing his depiction of that passage to manhood, Marvin Neil Simon has written his most mature work for the theater.
Like its previous companions, ”Broadway Bound” can stand independent of the other two plays in the trilogy; but it becomes a richer work if one has in mind the dramatic events that have preceded it.
”Brighton Beach Memoirs,” the sunniest work in the trio, found Eugene as a quick, flip teenager, confiding to the audience through entries in his diary the hopes and fears of his writing dreams and his sexual awakenings. There are some dark spots of prejudice and hard times amid Eugene`s running gags, but on the whole, the play is warm and amusing, converting conjugal problems and adolescent agonies into quick jokes and merry bits and ending with Eugene triumphantly looking ahead to more adventure.
Even here, however, Simon gave his play a surprising depth through its scenes of domestic life in a specifically Jewish home. There were, of course, the hilarious scenes–Eugene`s complaints about his mother`s cooking are among the funniest Simon has written–but in addition, such outbursts as the sudden, hurtful quarrels between Eugene and his older brother, Stanley, or between his mother and his widowed Aunt Blanche were delineated with sharp insights into the nature of pain, as well as joy, in the family unit.
By the time Eugene left home behind for the Army barracks of ”Biloxi Blues,” his knowledge of the world`s cruelty was growing. Here, on his own for the first time, Eugene learned hard lessons of betrayal and prejudice, along with the bittersweet knowledge of sex. As he bids the audience farewell in the final monologue from his diary, some sadness and regret have intruded into his still optimistic view of what life will hold for him.
With ”Broadway Bound,” Eugene, and Simon, come to terms with themselves and their family, both as comic creations and as human beings.
Despite its title, the play (which I saw last week in Washington) has little to do with the bright lights of show business. In one of its plot lines, it details the beginnings of the Jerome brothers` work in comedy writing, climaxing when they are hired (as were the Simon brothers) for the Phil Silvers show. But the primary thrust of the play is delivered in an often bloody arena of family turmoil, dealing with characters who are quite complex and occasionally unappealing.
There is wearing tension, not only between the natural comic spirit of Eugene and the hard-driving ambition of his brother, but between every other member of the family. The domestic difficulties that the teenaged Eugene saw as comic skirmishes have become brutal, painful battles that inflict lasting wounds.
The play`s setting, a cross-section of the Jeromes` two-story house, is the same as that of ”Brighton Beach Memoirs,” but the atmosphere within has changed radically. Eugene has evolved from a wise-cracking kid into a thoughtful, tougher young man, now in his late 20s, who sees his family being torn apart. Jonathan Silverman, who portrayed Eugene when ”Brighton Beach Memoirs” played Chicago in 1984, plays the older Eugene with fewer one-liners and more introspection, greatly reducing his asides to the audience as the family`s story crowds his career concerns out of the spotlight.
Some of the characters from the first play–his mother, father, brother and aunt–are reprised in ”Broadway Bound” (by different actors), and a new character–Eugene`s maternal grandfather, an unreconstructed Trotskyite who had his last good laugh in the 1929 stock market crash–has been added. Simon gives them funny lines and situations, as usual, but he carefully tries to go beyond the comic cliches of Jewish mother and nagging parents to show them as common, even ugly persons who nonetheless are entitled to their share of dignity.
In walking this fine line, Simon also purposely reveals, defends and explains his own strengths and limitations as a writer of comedy, noting at one point that the writing half of him can be ”an angry, hostile son of a bitch” in his handling of people. His grandfather in the play wants a comedy to be ”about something,” not just a collection of funny lines, a goal toward which Simon is obviously striving in ”Broadway Bound.” And it is this crusty, near-senile grandfather who, in a subtext of warning to the future comedy writer, angrily shouts to his grandson, ”I don`t trust affection!
Sometimes people give it to you instead of the truth.”
The particular triumph of ”Broadway Bound” in its climactic second act is that it is able to blend affection and truth with great power and eloquence, both of which are abundantly illustrated in the finest scene Simon has written for the stage. It comes late in the action of ”Broadway Bound,” and it focuses on the play`s real star, Eugene`s mother.
Through much of the comedy, she has been the needling, nagging Jewish mother who gets the old, familiar laughs. But by the end of the play, with her personal life a shambles, she has turned into a creature of great sorrow and weariness, as well. She has her nobility, though, as we discover in her simple, beautiful account of the love she has for the old dining room table that she carefully shines and preserves as a symbol of family unity.
It is at this point that Eugene, her son, asks her to tell him once again the story from her own youth about the night she danced with George Raft. Then, in what amounts to a brilliant monologue (brilliantly played by Linda Lavin), the mother tells her son about the one time when she, too, reached for and found the stars. It`s a breathtaking few minutes, sure to become a theater classic, but Simon tops it, when, at the end of her story, Eugene turns on the parlor radio and asks his mother to dance with him, as she did with that movie star so many years ago. She hesitates at first, but with Eugene`s prodding, she rises and is led by her son into a giddy whirl of joyous remembrance. Not the least of its stunning pleasures is the moment created by Lavin, director Gene Saks and costumes designer Joseph Aulisi when we notice, in a graceful tango dip, that, underneath the mother`s plain black dress, this woman still has terrific legs.
For Eugene, this is a story so perfect that it should be a movie. But, as his mother wisely, ruefully reminds him, ”Well, this movie isn`t over yet.” And, as Eugene himself explains in his last speech to the audience, life sometimes has a way of not coming to a clear-cut conclusion.
Nevertheless, even with this sad wisdom in mind, Eugene–and Simon
–remain cheerful in their view of life. As Eugene waves goodbye to his home and prepares to begin a life of his own, he can still happily assert that, for all the problems and pain his mother had experienced, at least she had danced with George Raft for one great moment in her life.
This may not be the stuff of great tragedy, but it is a triumphant piece of sentiment, and perhaps the best Neil Simon play that Neil Simon ever could write. Within the boundaries of his comic sensibilities, Simon has created a sustained saga of moving, as well as amusing, power. In these three plays, even ragged theatrical cliches, such as a burst of ”I love you” confession from child to parent, is turned into a moment of fresh, lovely truth.
It`s irrelevant at this point to argue about Simon`s permanence in American drama. A century from now, audiences will continue to be entertained by his romantic comedies, and the best of them will belong in drama textbooks, much as the 18th Century comedies of Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan are enjoyed and admired today.
As he approaches his 60th birthday, Simon now has ended one major phase of his work with the superbly modulated and expanding trio of ”Brighton Beach Memoirs,” ”Biloxi Blues” and ”Broadway Bound.” These works share more than a penchant for the letter ”B.” They form a classic example of domestic drama, written by a man who, through reaching deeply into his own experience, has created a universal portrait of the enduring joys and sorrows of family.
