that appear in Neil Simon: A Casebook, ed. Gary Konas (Garland, 1997).
We begin with an overview of Simon's plays and techniques from Ruby Cohn, who needs no introduction to critics of contemporary drama. Renowned for her extensive work on Samuel Beckett (the 20th century's supreme illuminator of our absurd existence), Cohn began her recent book Anglo-American Interplay in Recent Drama (Cambridge UP) with a long chapter on Neil Simon and Alan Ayckbourn. A slightly abridged version of that essay, "Funny Money in New York and Pendon," is presented here. It may seem odd to include a dual-focused article in a book devoted to Simon, but Cohn's comparisons between today's master comic playwrights of America and England, respectively, yield strong insights. Particularly for the reader who has not recently read Simon extensively, this essay will provide an excellent review of his (as well as Ayckbourn's) work.
Next we flash back, in "Washington Heights Doc," to Neil Simon's days as a youth during the early 1940s. Alan Cooper uses his own reminiscences along with those of several childhood friends of "Doc" Simon to construct a vivid black-and-white portrait of the Upper Manhattan neighborhood in which Simon grew up, re-creating the social, as well as the geographical, makeup of Washington Heights. In the essay we "hang out" with the adolescent Doc, Stan, Packy, Bugs, Stinky, and others on the Jewish west side of Broadway, while the Irish kids congregate to the east of that unofficial boundary. During our visit to these simpler times of double features, candy stores, and unconsummated plots to meet girls, we come to understand the sources of friendship, familial strain, and gently inflected Jewish speech patterns that would later appear in Simon's works. We also follow Doc as he leaves Washington Heights for military duty that would allow him to develop his talent for writing. The reader may wish to think of Cooper's evocative essay as this week's episode of the Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe serial preceding the main feature.
Ellen Schiff's "Funny, He Does Look Jewish" reviews, with impressive expansiveness, 20th-century Jewish writing, touching upon dozens of examples from America and Europe. In the process she shows how Simon fits into the paradigm of the Jew writing in America. He is, for example, an overachiever, like several other Jewish playwrights. Schiff looks at the issue of Jewish names and traits in plays, European inspirations including Yiddish literature, Jewish history, and Jewish family plays, examining in some detail Simon's Brighton Beach trilogy and Lost in Yonkers. She concludes that after 30 years of writing plays Simon has become more aware of the value of his Jewish heritage and how it has informed his work. As a side benefit, this essay could serve as a valuable literature review for the study of other contemporary Jewish-American playwrights.
Peter L. Hays approaches Simon's heritage from a different direction, that of the history of Jewish humor in America. While noting the high percentage of Jews among American comedians, Hays touches upon various forms of comedy they employ. He examines the importance of self-deprecating and stereotypical humor and shows how Simon uses these techniques in his plays, as well as Yiddish speech patterns, for comic effect. Humor has often been used by Jewish comedians and writers as a defense against anti-Semitism and exclusion, and Simon is no exception. Hays shows that pain frequently lies just beneath the surface of laughs in Simon's work, where "the method is deflection of anxiety through comedy."
The pain of Jews is addressed even more explicitly in Bette Mandl's "Beyond Laughter and Forgetting: Echoes of the Holocaust in Lost in Yonkers." As the title suggests, Mandl detects subtle reminders of the Shoah in this family comedy-drama. Although Hitler is mentioned at least twice in the play, the Holocaust is perhaps most strongly embodied in Grandma Kurnitz, who as a German Jewish refugee and intimidating disciplinarian, seems to represent both victim and perpetrator. In this "Holocaust-inflected" play the effects on the boys Jay and Arty, to whom their temporary home seems like a concentration camp, are subtler than in Arthur Miller's Broken Glass, a work in which the Holocaust influence is much more overt. Nevertheless, becoming attuned to this subtextual issue helps us better understand the multilayered texture of Lost in Yonkers, arguably Simon's finest play to date.
Rounding out this quintet of essays about Neil Simon's Jewish background is James Fisher's "'A Perfect and an Upright Man': A Reassessment of God's Favorite." The title quotes the biblical description of Job, a modern version of whom is the play's protagonist. Fisher argues that God's Favorite, despite being a work Simon expected to fail on Broadway, is not the mediocre play that many felt it was in 1974. The essay shows how Simon staged an effective comic treatment of the Old Testament tale, perhaps as praiseworthy as MacLeish and Chayefsky's better-received dramatizations of Job's plight (in J.B.and Gideon, respectively). The essay also addresses the autobiographical inspiration for the play, namely, the untimely death of Simon's first wife in 1973. Fisher refutes much of the negative criticism lodged against the play and argues that God's Favoriterepresents yet one more step in Simon's lifelong quest as a Jewish-American playwright to show our need to endure in the face of life's (and sometimes death's) unfairness and absurdity.
The next section of the book examines more specific connections between Neil Simon and other dramatists. First, in "Men in Fancy Clothes; or, Menander on the 23rd Floor," Arvid F. Sponberg shows that what Simon is doing in his comedies can be traced back 2200 years to the Greek playwright who was even more prolific than Simon. Sponberg takes us on a witty tour from Greek New Comedy to American Newer Comedy, showing us along the way that, even after two millennia, pressure to conform to unquestioned societal norms remains solid comic material. He compares Menander's Dyskolos--the only one of his 100 plays to survive intact--with Simon's Laughter on the 23rd Floor,(1993) both of which illustrate the important gap between the persona we present the world and who we really are. Sponberg asserts that good playwrights from Menander to Simon have understood that the "collision between private fears and public authority releases high levels of comic energy on stage."
The other elucidation of Simon's dramatic heritage is grounded in the 20th century, as Glenda Frank presents "Fun House Mirrors: The Neil Simon-Eugene O'Neill Dialogue." Frank's purpose is not to assert that Simon occupies the same lofty platform as America's greatest dramatist. She does, however, make several cogent side-by-side comparisons of specific works of the two playwrights, yielding surprising yet persuasive insights into Come Blow Your Hornand the Brighton Beach trilogy by citing relevant aspects of O'Neill's Long Day's Journeyand Ah, Wilderness! She also invokes key ideas from thinkers ranging from Bergson to Bakhtin to Bloom. Even though O'Neill would be considered much the more "serious" playwright, Frank demonstrates a number of similarities between him and Simon, including a "sympathy of mind." This essay makes clear the appropriateness of Simon's choice to name the protagonist of his trilogy Eugene Jerome.
We move on to several patterns observable in groups of Simon's works. First, Michael Abbott discusses "Neil's Women." While touching upon a wide range of Simon's plays, he focuses on The Gingerbread Lady (1970) as an example of Simon's newfound maturity as a playwright, especially in his treatment of female protagonists. Evy Meara is such a complex, troubled character that even the playwright could offer no simple explanation for her self-destructive nature--in this case a sign of good, rather than confused, writing. We also see, in Lost in Yonkers, how Simon endows the simple-minded Bella with simple dignity and self-respect, to powerful effect. Abbott draws a number of conclusions about what Simon's women want--namely, "the whole package"--and how he usually withholds instant wish fulfillment, just as he does for his male characters.
Moving to a different segment of humanity, Richard Grayson discusses Simon's homosexual characters in "The Fruit Brigade." He, too, discusses The Gingerbread Lady, in which a gay man, Jimmy, has a complex relationship with protagonist Evy. Overall Grayson finds that Simon empathizes with his gay characters. He is particularly effective in Biloxi Blues(from which the essay's title expression is taken), a play featuring both a closet homosexual and another soldier assumed to be gay by his cohorts. The California Suiteplaylet "Visitors from London," which yielded the witty bisexual character Sidney and dissatisfied wife Diana, worked so well that Simon wrote London Suitein part so he could revisit that couple 19 years later. In general, Simon's attitude toward homosexuality reßects that of his liberal, largely heterosexual audience.
While Simon handles these all-too-human characters effectively, Peter Teitzman analyzes the way Simon has constructed a collective non-human character known as New York City. He notes that The Big Apple often functions in Simon's work as "The Ominous Apple," providing a source of conflict for human characters. Although Simon exploited the quirkiness of New York even in his earliest works, the seeds of this menacing presence truly bear fruit in 1969-1970, with the film The Out-of-Townersand the play The Prisoner of Second Avenue. This presence fits well into Simon's themes of life's strangeness and the need to endure, as the normal headaches of living in New York escalate to migraine proportions.
The final essay in this section, David Finkle's "They're Playing My Book," looks at the five musicals for which the playwright has served as book writer, as well as several other musicals for which "Doc" Simon made uncredited house calls to invigorate ailing libretti. Finkle senses that while Simon generally contributed solid work in Little Me, Sweet Charity, Promises, Promises, They're Playing Our Song, and The Goodbye Girl, such projects seemed mainly to provide a change of pace for the playwright. Simon himself has noted that in a musical, just when things get interesting, the book writer has to turn the action over to the songwriters, which must frustrate such a skilled dramatist. Nevertheless, these five works--all but one hits--represent a significant portion of Simon's output, and Finkle's research has unearthed interesting, little-known information on these musicals.
Given Simon's predilection to write scenes--even entire play acts--around a single pair of characters, the dialogue seems an appropriate way to discuss his work. We close the casebook with four dialogues. The first one focuses on Jake's Women. Brian Rhinehart and Norman N. Holland ruminate on this play from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, and they discuss the play as a postmodern work that, unlike earlier Simon plays, calls attention to itself as a theatrical artifact. Rhinehart and Holland ultimately agree that Jake's Womeneffectively treats its theme of personal connection--the attempt to bridge that two-inch gap that separates us, even from those we love. Browsers of this casebook are invited to turn first to this dazzling verbal joust--which caroms from Aristotle to Shakespeare to Freud--to see whether, once they begin reading, they can put the book down.
Equally delightful is Alan Cooper's interview with Emanuel Azenberg. Those who assume that all producers are simply accountant-lawyers will be pleasantly surprised to meet Manny Azenberg, a true humanist who has produced every one of Neil Simon's 17 plays since 1973's The Sunshine Boys, with number 18 in the works. Given theatrical egos and the vicissitudes of Broadway, this record rivals shortstop Cal Ripken's consecutive-game streak (2300 and counting at this writing). The interview yields a true insider's perspective on Simon (including Azenberg's assessment of his friend's skills as a second baseman), delivered in his distinctive verbal style. I found his reßections on The Goodbye Girl--Simon's only unsuccessful musical--as interesting as the show itself.
Although Glenn Loney's interview with Neil Simon dates back to 1969, it yields considerable useful information--most previously unpublished--that complements works (especially The Out-of-Towners)and themes discussed elsewhere in this casebook. The conversation touches upon Simon's early life, the nature of creativity, and the differences between working in theatre and film, between comedy and drama. Although Loney makes occasional parenthetical comments from today's perspective, remarkably little of what Simon said to him a quarter century ago seems dated today.
Jackson Bryer's interview with Neil Simon is much more recent (December 1994), ranging from Simon's childhood to his latest plays, with discussions of the works of others as well as his own. Simon discusses the current state of Broadway and his reasons for moving Off-Broadway with London Suite. Having interviewed Simon twice before, Bryer took this latest opportunity to probe, at some length, several previously unexplored aspects of the playwright's life and work.