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03 Nov 2009 11:41
Tuesday, 03 November 2009
Who's afraid of Neil Simon?
The first Broadway productions of plays by Neil Simon and Edward Albee opened within about a year-
and- a- half of each other, Come Blow Your Horn in February 1961 and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in October 1962. This consideration shows us a rather different Broadway than the one we have now. Both Simon and Albee matured on the Broadway rather than the off- Broadway stage, peaking over the next twenty years or so; then there was a considerable dropoff in their presence in these larger theatres. When Edward Albee's career was celebrated not long ago, it was at the off-
Broadway Signature Theatre Company, although Broadway revivals of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Seascape and a main stem production of a new play, The Goat, enjoyed considerable runs. Neil Simon's return has not been as lucky. As The New York Times, Garrett Eisler and Leonard Jacobs have been reporting, the much- ballyhooed Broadway revivals of Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs and Broadway Bound failed spectacularly this past weekend, closing on Sunday after 25 previews and nine performances; Broadway Bound never even had a chance to begin previews. The failure is indicative of a sea change in Broadway production, but more in Simon's reputation. At one point in the 1960s, Simon had three plays in simultaneous production on Broadway, each successful; he was the boulevard Albee, one of America's two most famous consistently active playwrights, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams having fallen somewhat out of favor. Albee is now enjoying a renaissance, why not Simon? There has been considerable handwringing in the press from both Simon and his producer Emanuel Azenberg, as well as a variety of critics, but as is the case with many theatrical failures a case study will not yield significant results or lessons to be learned for future producers. (One would have thought that a musical called Springtime for Hitler, for example, would close the first night.)
It will come as something of a shock to regular readers of this blog to discover that one of the first books I bought when I started writing plays as a teenager was the old Avon paperback edition of The Plays of Neil Simon (back before it became "Volume 1" of the Collected Plays), which contained most of Simon's early work from Come Blow Your Horn through The Odd Couple, Plaza Suite and Last of the Red Hot Lovers. It never occurred to me then that these were, as some of Simon's detractors would have it, well-
oiled laugh machines. In his best plays there is always considerable texture and thoughtfulness, even in the most frantic of the hotel- room farces. The plays last because the situations are recognizable human conflicts, and formally Simon took the wild farce and frenetic wordplay of George S. Kaufman's plays and plunked them down into middle- class domestic interiors instantly recognizable to his audiences. A young playwright can learn a lot about structure, jokes and character by reading Neil Simon, and many of these early plays remain stageworthy even now, nearly 50 years after they were written. What happened to the recent revivals? Nobody knows, and nobody ever will. But the guessing game is attractive. When I first read about the revivals, I was surprised to learn that the second Eugene Jerome play, Biloxi Blues, was not to be a part of the rotating repertory and producing two plays of a trilogy is hardly an "event," instead indicating more of a failure of ambition or faith, a halfway tribute to Simon's best middle-
period work that went so far and no further. And one can't leave out the effects of the recession: most of Simon's previous work was dependent for its success on out- of- town group sales, which well- handled can fill a theatre for the first six months of any run. But people are staying closer to home, and when they do come to New York, it is to see a musical rather than the stage original of a film they might have seen fifteen or twenty years ago. As the success of the Albee revivals, as well as August: Osage County, God of Carnage and new plays from David Mamet, indicates, it may be that the straight-
play audience on Broadway now expects somewhat meatier fare, preferring their drama, and even their comedy and farce, with a darker edge. In which case a Simon revival would still have served and, I would argue, have found some success where Brighton Beach Memoirs could not. An overview of Simon's career demonstrates a surprising variety of theme, ambition and interest, as well as form. The Good Doctor, an anthology of adaptations of Chekhov stories, has considerable appeal (and points up Simon's stylistic and theatrical indebtedness to Chekhov); God's Favorite is a witty allegory of the story of Job; Lost in Yonkers may come closest to being Simon's masterpiece, a far less sentimental picture of the sepia- toned family memories that comprise the earlier Jerome trilogy, with brilliantly written roles for older women that recall Simon's other worthwhile family melodrama, The Gingerbread Lady. And there's also 1971's The Prisoner of Second Avenue, which, except for its lack of cellphones and Internet connections, could have been written yesterday, detailing the collapse of the American middle-
class urban dream and the fraying of gender and family roles in the person of a laid- off ("fired," he insists) sales executive, Mel Edison, who becomes addicted to Valium. Again, this is perhaps an instantly recognizable situation even for the American middle- class of 2009: a starkly funny, often melancholy, and, by the end, devilishly hopeful satire. (There is a fine, underrated 1975 film of the play starring Jack Lemmon and Anne Bancroft.) What next for Simon? It remains to be seen whether ambitious directors and producers might reconceive Simon's work for a contemporary stage practice, but there's no reason to think that such more innovative productions might not work. Let Ivo van Hove loose on Plaza Suite or Elizabeth LeCompte on Laughter on the 23rd Floor or Rumors and see what happens. (Director David Cromer's work on Brighton Beach Memoirs was apparently strong, but there's no indication that it differed much in approach from the original staging by Gene Saks: all hail Stanislavskian realism.) But we all know what we fear: a revival, twenty years from now, of The Sunshine Boys with an aging Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane. Perhaps we may remain devilishly hopeful as well.
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