On the opening night of his very first Broadway hit 35 years ago, Neil Simon stood in the back of the theater almost sick with anxiety. “Don’t worry,” his wife told him, “the audience is listening.” And Simon shot back, “They shouldn’t be listening. They should be laughing.”
The next morning, the reviews for the comedy “Come Blow Your Horn” were mixed, and when Simon went to the box office to see if there was a line for tickets, he remembers, “There was nothing, no one at all, just the guy cleaning the lobby; that was it.”
But the play hung on, at first on the basis of free tickets that the producers gave out to clubs and service organizations and passersby, until it found its audience and went on for a long, profitable run.
Twenty-eight plays later, with a 1991 Pulitzer Prize in hand and with a Kennedy Center Honors ceremony ahead of him in December, Simon is still worrying, still anxious, still tinkering.
“London Suite,” the first off-Broadway play by the man who has written more Broadway hits than any other American dramatist, is about to open Monday in Chicago at the Briar Street Theatre. This is its first outing since it played in New York last season, and it is undergoing major surgery for the event.
Originally a quartet of playlets set in the same London hotel suite, the show on this occasion will be reduced to three short pieces, a direct result of its off-Broadway experience.
“When we first produced the play in Seattle,” Simon explains, “the story about the man who takes revenge on the accountant who has stolen millions from him was a smash. But in New York, the audience is just sitting there. Nothing’s happening. They’re nervous about seeing one man hold a gun to another man’s head for 30 minutes.”
For the Chicago production, director Michael Leavitt asked Simon to write a new opener for the play. Simon obliged, with “The Book Tour,” about a Jackie Collins-type author besieged by the tabloid press. But getting the new piece on its feet proved too draining on the process of getting the whole production ready for its premiere here, so the project was dropped and Simon and Leavitt are now restructuring the play to suit its new three-part format.
Leavitt, who has successfully directed three earlier Simon plays in Chicago, says of his playwright, “He keeps trying different things in all his work–drama, comedy, farce–but wherever he goes, the humor he finds comes out of real situations and real people, regular people you can identify with.”
Simon, who started writing comedy with his older brother Danny when he was still in his teens, is old enough now (68) to have a daughter, Ellen, who is a playwright, and Simon watched the reviews for her current screenplay, “Moonlight and Valentino,” with all the concern he gives his own critical reception.
“I was worried that the reviews might say, `Here’s another Simon who wants to write. Run for the hills.’ There were a few low blows like that, but most of the reviews, good and bad, didn’t mention me.
“Anyway, I’m not a great believer in genes carrying talent. If I followed my own genes, I’d be selling piece goods in the garment industry, like my father. No, my genes came from working with Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner and Larry Gelbart and all the other writers on the old `Your Show of Shows’ TV programs.”
Like much of Simon’s real life, his early days as a TV comedy writer were turned into a play, “Laughter on the 23rd Floor.” His childhood and young manhood resulted in a trio of plays–“Brighton Beach Memoirs,” “Biloxi Blues” and “Broadway Bound”–plus “Lost in Yonkers.” And the trauma that followed the death of his wife, Joan, was dramatized in “Chapter Two.”
Now he has put his life between covers. In between preparing scripts for seven new TV movie adaptations of his plays and starting work on another comedy, Simon in the last year has finished a memoir, to be published next year by Simon & Schuster.
Titled “Rewrites,” it runs about 500 pages and takes him only up to Joan’s death, “which changed my life forever,” he says. A second volume, taking up the later years, may follow.
“I called the plays about my life semiautobiographical,” Simon says, “because I changed things and characters around in them. In `Brighton Beach Memoirs,’ for example, we took relatives into our home, but actually, it was the other way around. We had to move in with relatives in the Depression.
“It wasn’t a grim childhood, nothing like Dickens or anything like that, but I did come from a broken home, and that left its mark. Somehow, I knew I would get on and escape from it, although becoming a playwright was something I never imagined. It was too high, too hard.”
It is still hard. “I talk to college kids about my plays, and they think it has been all hits for me, no flops. But, believe me, it hasn’t been one hit after another. There have been times . . .”
One of those times was last year, when the musical version of his “The Goodbye Girl” had a rocky opening in Chicago and an unprofitable run on Broadway.
“I’m the kind of writer, for a musical, who needs a guy like Bob Fosse or Michael Bennett to lead the way; but Gene Saks, who’s a very good director, couldn’t do that in this case. And we had a $9 million advance, so we almost had to get on with it. But you’d be surprised at how quickly that $9 million fades.”
The best and smartest director Simon has worked with, he says, is Mike Nichols, who directed four hit Simon plays and the screen version of “Biloxi Blues.”
“I used to think that if I watched him carefully through rehearsals, I could learn how to direct a play myself. But all I learned was that he had a very high level of intelligence, and he kept pushing me to do better.”
Those heady days are gone now, however. The off-Broadway presentation of “London Suite” did not turn a profit, and Broadway, where “Come Blow Your Horn” was produced for $75,000 in 1960, is now excessively expensive for a straight play. “That’s a blight and a sadness,” Simon says. “I don’t think a play can make a profit now until you add the money from the stock and amateur rights.”
Yet Simon continues to write, and rewrite, for the theater. He is often in his element in the early days of production, when he can see the show in rehearsals and then with an audience.
A writer who writes no matter when or where, Simon still uses a typewriter to turn out his work. “I had an expert come in and explain a computer to me, but in the time it took to set up the mouse and all those other things, I could write a paragraph. Though if I had a laptop computer, I probably could write on planes, and that would be OK.”
The years at his typewriter have taken their toll on Simon. He has a bad back that he believes comes from sitting hunched over at his desk.
Writing comedy, he allows, still does not come easy. “I have friends,” Simon says, “who come up to me and whisper, `I have this great joke. Maybe you can use it in one of your plays.’ They don’t understand.
“I used to belong to this tennis club in Los Angeles, where I live. I would play two sets of tennis and then excuse myself and go up to my office. So my tennis partners would ask, `What are you going to do now?’ and I told them I was going to write. And they didn’t get it. They didn’t know how you do it.
“So I tried to explain: `You sit and you think and you write.’ It sounds simple, but that’s how you do it, and it’s very hard.”
