Neil Simon: The Unshine Boy
ONLY two playwrights have more than one hit currently running on Broadway: William Shakespeare (Much Ado About Nothing and Two Gentlemen of Verona) and Neil Simon (The Prisoner of Second Avenue and one of TIME'S top ten of 1972, The Sunshine Boys). When Mr. Shakespeare's representative announced that he was unavailable, Associate Editor Stefan Kanfer settled for an interview with Neil Simon. At 45, Simon retains the astonished demeanor of a man who has just heard a loud noise. It is probably the sound of a cosmic cash register. In nine years Simon has become a theatrical legend. His second play, Barefoot in the Park, grossed more than $9,000,000 and played in 14 languages (plus television). Thereafter, as regular as the Internal Revenue Service, Simon has produced approximately one hit a year, among them The Odd Couple, Plaza Suite and The Last of the Red Hot Lovers. At one time he had four shows running simultaneously, a Shavian feat. In his spare time he confected the books for two successful musicals, Sweet Charity and Promises, Promises, and wrote several movies, among them the new and delightful Heartbreak Kid. Still, with all the disproportionate rewards (Simon owns a plush town house, a country place, a Broadway theater, real estate, cattle and, very possibly, the Atlantic Ocean), he seems less than joyful. He has been described, too often, as a mechanical "yockmeister" whose characters are only scan deep. Moreover, the savor seems to have gone out of his triumphs. Another Simon smash is no longer news; it would take a failure to astonish anyone, and Simon seems incapable of one. All of which drove Simon into a deep depression last year, a gloom from which he is only beginning to emerge. He is, in brief, a character in a Neil Simon play. In preparing an Essay on Simon and American humor, Kanfer found that the notes from his interview with the playwright mystically rearranged themselves into dramatic form. 2 a.m. on Third Avenue, Manhattan. NEIL SIMON is walking his shaggy dog and, improbably, swinging a tennis racket. An AMORPHOUS MASS suddenly takes the shape of an ageless human being. It taps SIMON on the shoulder.
SIMON
Stand back! This is a deadly weapon.
(Brandishing racket.)
AMORPHOUS MASS Listen, a mugger you could fool. Me you can't.
SIMON Sorry. It's just that I haven't stopped flinching since I was attacked.
A.M By a critic?
SIMON By a man who came up behind me, knocked me down and yelled, "That'll teach you to call me a fag!"
A.M.
Like a scene in a Neil Simon play.
SIMON You know me?
A.M.
Does the hand know the glove? You don't recognize?
SIMON No.
A.M.
You know when the critics write, "Opening night at Neil Simon's new comedy the audience laughed as one"?
SIMON Yes...
A.M.
I'm the one. I come in, I laugh at the seats. I laugh at the ushers. The house lights dim, I laugh at the darkness. I laugh at the sets and costumes. By the time I hear the lines I'm already weak, a total setup for your gags.
SIMON But I don't write gags. A gag is Fred Allen saying a man is so bald he car ries his dandruff in his pocket.
AM And you write?
SIMON Comedy. Based on character. In The Sunshine Boys, Clark, an ex-vaudevillian, tells his oldtime partner, Lewis, that a friend is dead. Lewis asks, "Where did he Variety." die?" You And see the Clark tells difference him, be "In tween gags and comedy?
A.M No.
SIMON Let me put it another way.
A.M.
Don't do me favors. If I want analysis of ingredients I can read a Quaker Oats box. I only go to the theater to have a good time, not to think. (Upon the word theater, SIMON starts home to his type writer). Wait, don't go yet.
SIMON
I have to. I haven't written a scene in 20 minutes.
A.M.
You know what Mike Nichols says about you? "Other playwrights in his sit uation would buy plenty of clothes, go to a lot of parties and elect themselves Man of the Year. This one goes back to work." Listen, Marvin--I can call you Marvin?
SIMON It's my given name. But most people call me Neil, or by my boyhood nickname, "Doc."
A.M.
Listen, Marvin, let me ask a question.
SIMON No, let me ask you one. Why do you speak with Yiddish locutions? My audience isn't exclusively Jewish. Neither are my characters. Not any more, any way. Matter of fact, I still recall a black man pointing to a figure in my first play, Come Blow Your Horn, and insisting, "That's my father."
A.M.
Would you prefer it if I spoke like a critic?
SIMON
Anything but dialect.
A.M.
Very well. Mr. Simon, have you ever considered writing a tragedy?
SIMON You know something? I liked you better Jewish.
A.M There are critics who might say the same of you.
SIMON Still, most of you have been very indulgent.
A.M.
That is your tragedy. And you took us seriously. That is ours.
SIMON You mean The Gingerbread Lady.
A.M.
Your "serious" play, about the collapse of a Judy Garland-like singer.
A.M.
People expected laughter.
AM.
Yet we called you distinguished. We took it seriously.
SIMON Why don't you take me seriously now?
A.M.
Because you consistently verge upon the profound, the revealing--and then pull back, almost in embarrassment. There is a moving line in Plaza Suite that encapsulates the Simon career--and perhaps the country's as well...
SIMON
When the businessman says, "I have it all--marriage, children, more money than I ever dreamed--and I just want to do it all over again. I would like to start the whole damn thing over from the beginning."
A.M.
...and the wife says, "Frankly, Sam, I don't think the Navy would take you again." Truth masked with a gag--excuse me, with comedy.
SIMON But Plaza Suite was a comedy.
A.M.
Perhaps Christopher Fry said it best: "In tragedy every moment is eternity; in comedy, eternity is a moment." Your comedies, all of them screamingly funny, seem to evaporate as one hears them.
SIMON
But I don't start out to write comedy. I begin by studying all the tragic aspects of my characters.
A.M.
It just comes out funny.
SIMON That's it.
A.M.
But not all of it. It is a well-kept secret that you have written a play entitled God's Favorite--a retelling of the Job story. It is further known that Mike Nichols would be delighted to direct it and that when George C. Scott read it, he cabled, "When do we start?" And yet that play will not be seen.
SIMON
No.
A.M.
Why not?
SIMON
Maybe I don't trust "God" plays.
A.M.
Maybe you don't trust God.
SIMON
Why are you more ambitious for me than I am for myself?
A.M.
No one is more ambitious for you than you are for yourself.
SIMON
Then let me work it out my own way. My work is growing, it is more openly "serious." I couldn't write Barefoot in the Park again if you held a gun to my head.
A.M.
You're not growing fast enough. You are the finest American comic playwright of our time--perhaps of all time.
SIMON Isn't that enough?
A.M.
Perhaps. The clown has a great, fragile gift. He can write about essentially tragic topics--old age, impotence, even death--and make them truly amusing.
In a grim time we need the tonic of laughter. Yet comedy, like every other aspect of contemporary life, is in transition. How much longer can we be amused by the modest, well-made play?
Isn't there more to the age--and the stage--than that?
SIMON Yes, but comedy...
A.M.
Comedy now oscillates between two terminals: the denatured cackle of the TV sitcom and the self-conscious smirk of pornographic adventures. The middle ground of comic craftsmanship seems to be vanishing--perhaps because its creators are intimidated by the bigger, sicker joke of the contemporary world.
Enter the permanent paradox: The comic playwright is a mockingbird, not a vulture; what right has he to mock the face of war and pestilence, overcrowding and pollution? Still, when the world is too much with us, where can we turn except to the alleviating force of bright irrelevant laughter?
SIMON
Why don't we leave it to Albee or Pinter or Tennessee Williams?
A.M.
Because that's what we're doing now, and it's not enough. What happens in the next few years will fix you in Broadway history. As of now, you will be labeled a master clown. You could be remembered as a major playwright.
SIMON
Or as a clown that tried to be a major playwright. And yet--
A.M.
Precisely. "And yet." Henry James thought the two most beautiful words in the English language were "summer afternoon." But the two saddest ones in the American language are "and yet."
"They lived happily ever after--and yet." "I had a wonderful time--and yet." "Neil Simon has everything--a 19-year-old marriage to a beautiful wife, two daughters in the best schools, unlimited funds and leisure--and yet."
SIMON But suppose I do fail...?
A.M.
That's a risk we all have to take.
SIMON We? What do you mean we?
A.M.
You have to write. I have to go. (The AMORPHOUS MASS begins to vanish like the Cheshire cat.)
SIMON
Wait--don't you want to hear about my new play? It's about people trying to survive--literally stay alive--in the contemporary world. Actually, it's grim as hell.
A.M.
Sure, sure. I'll probably choke to death laughing at it. (The MASS vanishes, leaving only a smile.)
SIMON
Don't go! I like plays to have happy endings.
A.M.
Then stick with Old Doc Simon's prescription...
SIMON But you just said--
A.M.
Since when are audiences consistent? Besides, how do I know what I feel till I see what you say?
Even the smile disappears, leaving nothing but a man and a dog. They walk home morosely. The dog goes to sleep, and the man goes to work, producing eleven plays, six films and five musicals in the next two years. They match the G.N.P. dollar for dollar, making the AMORPHOUS MASS, the critics and the IRS delirious. SIMON continues to swing his racket in the dark, waiting either for a bus or an inspiration for a new and purely serious masterpiece. Neither vehicle arrives.
CURTAIN
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