My love for Neil Simon started as a youngster. I remember I was off school with asthma, lying in bed feeling sorry for myself and ‘Barefoot In The Park’ came on the television. Even though it was, what I considered to be, an ‘old’ film, I loved every minute of it. That love affair with his work still continues today. He had the very rare talent of being able to make you roar with laughter one minute and the next have you crying into your tissue. He was an exceptional, insightful playwright.
I have had the fortune to appear as Olive in The Odd Couple (Female Version) - which to-date is still, by far, the funniest play I have ever appeared in. It is the only play I have acted in where the cast had to wait, what seemed like minutes, for the audience to stop laughing before we could carry on with our lines! I also directed a production of the beautiful Lost In Yonkers (for which he won four Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize), which I believe is one of his finest plays. Our production was entered into a festival, and we literally swept the board with our wins: Best Overall Production, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Actor Under 21, and Best Set. Both those plays for many reasons have a special place in my heart. My best friend (who acted in both the above productions) bought me a copy of the book Three From The Stage and it is signed by Neil Simon himself. It is one of my most treasured possessions.
Another favourite play (and movie) of mine is Brighton Beach Memoirs. The play is a semi-autobiographical look at the playwright’s formative years, and according to his wife, Elaine Joyce Simon, “If you’re looking for the heart and soul of Neil Simon, you’ll find everything you need to know in Brighton Beach Memoirs.”
The Wisdom of Neil Simon
In his books Rewrites and The Play Goes On he offers many pearls of wisdom about writing plays. Some of my favourites are:
“Write. Rewrite. Repeat. Plays never come to the writer fully formed, through divine inspiration. You can’t fall in love with your own words or worry about how much time you’ve invested in your first draft. You must be willing to rewrite.” Simon completely rewrote all 125 pages of his first play, Come Blow Your Horn, 22 times!
“Rarely when a play comes to me do I know how I will develop it. I never know who all the characters are nor how many there will be. It comes out drop by drop…. On the first day I start to write, I will put down almost anything, just trying to get the first introductory scene on paper, whether it’s good or not. I am introducing myself to the characters and them to me. Amenities over, they begin to speak.”
“In painting, as in composing or any art form, what you take out is as important as what you leave it.”
“I worked long and hard on each project, rewriting five times as much as I was writing, and … it still took me six months to a year to complete a play.”
“Characters First. Writing witty dialogue comes naturally to me. But writing a play is about so much more than getting a laugh. To have a solid foundation, you have to have strong characters.”
Simon says (quoting producer Max Gordon): “There’s no play without characters. First, you get your characters, then you get your story, then you get your dialogue.”
“No matter how funny lines are, they’re nothing more than funny lines if they do not push the story forward. It’s what happens to characters in the story that interests an audience more than anything.”
“You have to leave the audience some work to do on their own because their own discovery of the truth ultimately is more interesting to them.”
“Always make your protagonist and antagonist equal adversaries, so that the audience was always in doubt about who was right and who was wrong.” … I love this one, it is what I look for in so many plays I read!
“One tends to learn infinitely more from the bad than the good … Allow yourself the possibility of failure. You must, in fact, court failure. Let her be your temptress. There must be danger in the attempt and no net strung across the abyss to break your fall.”
“It is not autobiographical. An incident happens to you and it gives your imagination a starting point. But you turn it into someone else’s experience, hoping that it touches a nerve of identification in other people so that it may connect to something in their own lives.”
“(When I) make that stage a mirror of our own responses and reactions, … audiences seem to laugh at themselves. They usually say, ‘I know someone exactly like that,’ when in fact they may be talking about themselves.”
“Humor was the instrument I used to first reach people, and then, as an extension of the characters and stories, I would deliver the underlying issue, the pain that so many of us wanted to avoid at any cost.”
Neil Simon Timeline
1948 - Simon and his brother Danny join the writing staff of the radio comedy show, "Texaco Star Theater," starring Milton Berle
1952-1954 - Simon and Danny are recruited to pen jokes for the Sid Caesar TV series "Your Show of Shows."
February 22, 1961 - Simon's Broadway debut, "Come Blow Your Horn," opens at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. The semi-autobiographical play chronicles the misadventures of a womanizing bachelor and his naïve younger brother. The comedy is adapted into a movie starring Frank Sinatra in 1963.
October 23, 1963 - Simon's second Broadway production, "Barefoot in the Park," opens at the Biltmore Theatre. The show, directed by Mike Nichols, stars Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley. The comedy wins a Tony for best direction and receives three nominations, including best play. It is adapted into a 1967 film, with Redford and Jane Fonda.
March 10, 1965 - "The Odd Couple" opens at the Plymouth Theatre. Walter Matthau and Art Carney lead the original cast. A 1968 movie, with Matthau and Jack Lemmon, is based on the Tony-winning show. Simon receives his first Oscar nomination for the screenplay. In 1970, "The Odd Couple" premieres on TV, starring Tony Randall and Jack Klugman as bickering roommates. The character of Felix in "The Odd Couple" was based on Simon's older brother, Danny.
January 29, 1966 - Directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse, "Sweet Charity" opens on Broadway.
December 1, 1968 - Simon adapts the 1960 Billy Wilder film, "The Apartment" into a musical, "Promises, Promises," with songs by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. It opens at the Shubert Theatre. A tune from the show, "I'll Never Fall in Love Again" is recorded by Dionne Warwick.
December 17, 1972 - "The Heartbreak Kid," a film featuring Charles Grodin in his first lead role, premieres in New York. It is Simon's third (original) script written directly for the screen. The first two are "After the Fox" and "The Out-of-Towners."
June, 1976 - Simon spoofs film noir with "Murder by Death," starring Peter Sellers, Maggie Smith, Peter Falk and Truman Capote.
November, 1977 - "The Goodbye Girl," a bittersweet romantic comedy, is a box office hit. Simon earns an Oscar nomination for original screenplay and star, Richard Dreyfuss wins an Academy Award for best actor. Marsha Mason, Simon's second wife, costars.
March 27, 1983 - "Brighton Beach Memoirs," the first show in a trilogy of autobiographical plays about Simon's youth, opens on Broadway. "Biloxi Blues" and "Broadway Bound" complete the cycle.
June 29, 1983 - The Alvin Theatre on Broadway is renamed the Neil Simon Theatre midway through the run of "Brighton Beach Memoirs.". The only living playwright to have a New York theatre named in his honor.
February 21, 1991 - "Lost in Yonkers" opens on Broadway. A personal story about a dysfunctional Jewish family struggling in New York during the WWII era, the play wins a Pulitzer Prize for drama and four Tony Awards.
April 9, 1995 - Simon's first play to debut Off-Broadway, "London Suite" opens at the Union Square Theatre.
October, 1996 - The playwright's showbiz memoir, "Rewrites," is published.
1999 - Simon pens a second autobiography, "The Play Goes On."
March 2, 2004 - After years of illness, Simon receives a kidney transplant. The donor is his publicist, Bill Evans.
October 15, 2006 - The Kennedy Center honors Simon with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
August 26, 2018 - Simon dies of complications from pneumonia at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York.
From the stage to the silver screen
Many of his plays & musicals have been turned into movies:
The Heartbreak Kid (2007)
The Out-of-Towners (1999)
The Odd Couple II (1998)
Lost in Yonkers (1993)
The Marrying Man (1991)
Biloxi Blues (1988)
Brighton Beach Memoirs (1986)
The Slugger's Wife (1985)
The Lonely Guy (1984)
Max Dugan Returns (1983)
I Ought to Be in Pictures (1982)
Only When I Laugh (1981)
Seems Like Old Times (1980)
Chapter Two (1979)
California Suite (1978)
The Cheap Detective (1978)
The Goodbye Girl (1977)
Murder by Death (1976)
The Sunshine Boys (I) (1975)
The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975)
The Heartbreak Kid (1972)
Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1972)
Star Spangled Girl (1971)
Plaza Suite (1971)
The Out of Towners (1970)
Sweet Charity (1969)
The Odd Couple (1968)
Barefoot in the Park (1967)
After the Fox (1966)
Come Blow Your Horn (1963)