comparison is that Ayckbourn’s work has received a far more positive reception from the serious-minded critics, which may enable one to deduce what the critics find lacking in Simon.

The more positive critical assessment of Simon’s work, however, which began with the response to Chapter Two, seems at least partially justifiable; his later, semi-autobiographical plays are indeed different from his earlier comedies. Chapter Two does not seem to depend so much on one-liners and boisterous laughter. Written as a response to the death of his first wife, Chapter Two finally turned the focus of Simon’s plays toward dramatic narrative, toward the situations in which he put his characters. The play opens, quite typically, with a wisecracking character named Leo Schneider, but when Leo’s brother George is introduced, the pain that George feels over the loss of his wife Barbara begins to dominate the opening scene and create genuine pathos. The play does have sections where the one-liners predominate, but overall, the play focuses on the courtship of George and his new girlfriend, Jennie, and the portrayal in the last act of their posthoneymoon conflict is as genuine and moving as the pathos in the first scene. Those more serious qualities also appear prominently in Lost in Yonkers and in the plays of Simon’s autobiographical trilogy: Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and Broadway Bound. As Simon entered the twenty-first century, he continued to bask in the increased critical respect generated by these plays.

Critical opinion, however, is seldom unanimous. Although the new plays were clearly different, critics such as the redoubtable John Simon of New York magazine suggested that Neil Simon had simply substituted one commercial formula for another—that the gag writer had merely been replaced by a sentimental writer. So, although the disparagement of Simon’s work abated, not all voices were raised in praise.

Barefoot in the Park

First produced: 1963 (first published, 1964)

Type of work: Play

A newly married couple irons out superficial differences and agrees to live happily ever after, finding happiness for the bride’s mother in the bargain.

In Barefoot in the Park, newlyweds Corie and Paul Bratter have completed their six-day honeymoon and are moving into their first apartment. Corie is romantic, impulsive, and enthusiastic, while her husband is a proper, careful, even “stuffy” young attorney who is more concerned with his budding legal career than he is with helping to build their love nest and perpetuating the honeymoon atmosphere. Soon Corie and Paul quarrel, Paul questioning Corie’s judgment and Corie questioning Paul’s sense of romance and adventure. Complicating their discord is Corie’s attempt to enliven the life of her widowed mother, Ethel. Against Paul’s advice, Corie tricks her mother into a blind date with their eccentric neighbor, Victor Velasco, who skis, climbs mountains, and is known as “The Bluebeard of 48th Street.”

By the end of act 2, the question of the blind date has precipitated such a conflict between Corie and Paul that they agree to divorce, and in act 3, they fight over the settlement before Paul stalks out. Ethel and Velasco, however, reveal that they have found romance. Ethel has rediscovered her vitality, while Velasco has decided that he must act his age and settle down. After the new lovers depart, Paul returns, outrageously drunk, having walked barefoot in the park in the middle of winter to prove that he is not a “fuddy-duddy.” The newlyweds are reconciled and promise to live happily ever after.

Even in his first play, Simon had mastered the qualities that would make him enormously successful. First and foremost, Barefoot in the Park is clever and hilarious, filled with snappy dialogue and witty one-liners. One of the most famous of his “running gags” (a joke repeated for laughs) appears in this play. Because Paul and Corie’s apartment is on the fifth floor of their building, nearly all the characters suffer extreme exhaustion in the climb. The joke is carried throughout the play but continues to elicit laughter because Simon always finds a different angle when he repeats it.

Nevertheless, the limitation that has haunted Simon throughout his career is present: The humor of the one-liners overwhelms the potentially literary elements of the play. There is a clear sense that the characters and plot are simply serving as framework for the funny lines. As a result, the dramatic conflicts in the play do not seem real or deeply felt.

In act 3, for example, when Paul and Corie are arguing about their divorce, Simon manages to maintain the rich humor of the play, but he is not able to create a convincing sense of conflict at the same time. Corie exclaims that she wants Paul to move out immediately, and as Paul angrily begins to pack his suitcase, Corie says, “My divorce. When do I get my divorce?” Paul replies, “How should I know? They didn’t even send us our marriage license yet.” The one-liner reestablishes the play’s frivolous tone and creates the impression that there is really little at stake. There is no satiric attitude toward either point of view, no comic judgment of anyone’s folly, and really no thought process, only the explosive laughter that comes from the line. The dominant tone created by the one-liners suggests that this marital discord is both trivial and temporary, a condition that will be resolved painlessly in a happy ending.

Simon does attempt to make a serious point in his play, asserting that moderation will make everyone happier and that marriage is too important an institution to take lightly, but his sentiments strike most critics as conventional and not thought-provoking. Ironically, Simon’s penchant for safe sentiments traps him in this play. At a pivotal moment, when Corie’s mother is counseling Corie about how to resolve the marital conflict and get Paul back, Simon gives the mother some marriage-saving “wisdom” that dates the play and made it seriously anachronistic within a decade. What seemed to Simon in the early 1960’s to be conservative, conventional wisdom would soon become sexism in the 1970’s:It’s very simple. You’ve just got to give up a little of you for him. Don’t make everything a game. Just late at night in that little room upstairs. But take care of him. And make him feel important. And if you can do that, you’ll have a happy and wonderful marriage.

The Odd Couple

First produced: 1965 (first published, 1966)

Type of work: Play

Two men, one divorced and sloppy, the other newly separated from his wife and very tidy, discover that they cannot live together.

The Odd Couple was not merely another Neil Simon hit: It might be considered the greatest hit of his career, if popularity is measured by the kind of impact a play has on American culture. The Odd Couple ran on Broadway for nearly one thousand performances, then was made into a film (1968), then into a very successful network television program (1970-1975), and then recast in a female version (1985), in which the two roommates are played by women. These facts alone would be significant indications of popularity, but Simon’s play has had such an impact on American life that the phrase “odd couple” has become part of American folklore. Many may not remember the names of the two men or which was the messy one, but nearly every adult is familiar with the situation to which the phrase “odd couple” refers and can use the phrase to describe similar situations.

The Odd Couple refers to Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar. Oscar, the messy one, is divorced from his wife and lives alone in a spacious, eight-room apartment on Riverside Drive in New York City. Even when he entertains Felix and his other poker-playing buddies, Oscar’s apartment is littered with dirty dishes, discarded clothes, and even garbage. When Felix’s wife demands a trial separation, Felix comes to live with Oscar and soon wears out his welcome, even with their poker buddies, because he insists on keeping the apartment sparkling clean and tidy. Furthermore, Felix’s despondency over his separation not only depresses Oscar but also ruins Oscar’s plans to seduce the two British sisters, Cecily and Gwendolyn Pigeon, who live in the apartment above them. When Oscar can endure no more, he demands that Felix leave, and Felix moves upstairs temporarily with the Pigeon sisters, who find his sensitivity charming. Thus the play ends in an uncomplicated way, with Oscar and Felix agreeing to separate.

In many ways, Simon demonstrates more skill as a playwright in The Odd Couple than in earlier works. He does not depend on simple “running gags” such as the exhausting flights of stairs in Barefoot in the Park, and his one-liners are much more integrated into the play’s action and characterization. As adept as Simon had been with theatrical gesture in Barefoot in the Park, it is clear in The Odd Couple that he has become even more expert at creating a captivating theatrical experience for his audience.

For example, in the opening lines of the play, the poker players have gathered at Oscar’s apartment for a game, and the exasperated Speed is watching the painfully deliberate Murray shuffle the cards. This opening moment is spellbinding even before Speed’s first word is spoken. The curtain rises on an arresting image, an obviously lavish apartment comically devastated by neglect, a diverse group of men engaged in a smoky masculine ritual around the poker table, and the group’s focus immediately engaged on the comically slow Murray, shuffling the cards as if he were handling precious jewels. Speed then delivers the opening line and the first one-liner of the play:Speed (Cups his chin in his hand and looks at Murray) Tell me, Mr. Maverick, is this your first time on the riverboat?

Even in The Odd Couple, however, a masterpiece in many ways, Simon was still unable to achieve a convincing level of seriousness to accompany the rich laughter. This is most apparent at the end of the play, when it finally appears that there really has not been much of a point to the conflict between Oscar and Felix. Some critics claim that the play shows how incompatibility is as likely to occur between roommates as between spouses and that the spirit of compromise is necessary to partnership. Most critics argue, however, that this is not saying much beyond the painfully obvious.

The Odd Couple ends inconclusively without being thought-provoking; it ends ambiguously without being suggestive. Oscar and Felix part as friends, Oscar has become more neat and more responsible about paying his alimony, and Felix will spend a few days with the Pigeon sisters before facing some unknown future.

Last of the Red Hot Lovers

First produced: 1969 (first published, 1970)

Type of work: Play

A middle-aged man discovers that extramarital affairs are less satisfying than conventional matrimony.

Last of the Red Hot Lovers is one of the most amusing of Neil Simon’s comedies. It focuses on Barney Cashman, a forty-seven-year-old owner of a seafood restaurant who is afraid that the sexual revolution of the 1960’s is passing him by. Over the space of nine months, he invites three different women to his mother’s Manhattan apartment in an attempt to have an afternoon of extramarital sex. None of the affairs is consummated, however, and Barney decides after the last one that he would prefer a romantic afternoon with his wife, Thelma.

Of the three women who meet Barney, the first two are caricatures of sexually liberated women from the 1960’s. In act 1, Elaine Navazio comes to the afternoon tryst as a veteran of casual sex. In her late thirties and married, Elaine indulges frequently in extramarital affairs simply because they make her feel good. Flippant and irreverent, Elaine is openly contemptuous of Barney’s maladroit, unsophisticated style (he is nervous, wanting the affair to be “meaningful”) and bombards him with insults that hit like machine-gun fire. She is interested only in their sensual experience and is comically desperate for a cigarette throughout their meeting. When the encounter fails to produce sexual satisfaction, Elaine leaves, and Barney vows never to be tempted again. Yet eight months later, he repeats the experience with Bobbi Michele.

Bobbi is an uninhibited and adventurous twenty-seven-year-old woman who entices Barney into smoking his first marijuana and regales him with wild stories about her prospects in show business, about men attempting to have sex with her, and about the lesbian Nazi vocal coach with whom she lives. The totally bizarre Bobbi generates tremendous laughter as her high-energy, nonstop talk reduces Barney to bewilderment. The frenetic pace that was established in the first act with Elaine is maintained, and perhaps even topped, in this segment.

In act 3, less than a month later, Barney is attempting to seduce Jeanette Fisher, who is thirty-nine years old and the wife of a close friend. Unlike the promiscuous Elaine and Bobbi, Jeanette is a reluctant visitor, joining Barney only because she thinks her husband, Mel, is having an affair of his own. Depressed and guilt-ridden, an unwilling participant in the prevailing sexual climate, Jeanette lectures Barney on moral issues and challenges him to prove that there are decent people in the world. The comic energy in this segment is generated by the reversal of Barney’s role. In this act Barney has become the aggressor, having gained savoir faire and confidence from his previous meetings. Rich laughter is generated by the conflict between Barney’s new impatience and Jeanette’s reticence. Barney finally sees the wisdom of not engaging in illicit sex, and when he and Jeanette part at the end of the play, Barney seems to be cured of his desire for promiscuity.

In addition to being a very funny play, Last of the Red Hot Lovers is a critique of the permissive 1960’s from a conservative point of view. Simon’s message is that the conventional values of marriage, home, and family are still sacrosanct, even though they seem old-fashioned in the prevailing cultural climate. Ironically, Simon’s conservative thinking serves him well in this case. Looking back, one can see that the permissiveness of the 1960’s was beginning to fade as Simon was writing this comedy. The increasingly moralistic climate of the 1980’s would make this play look like an eloquent and prophetic swan song for an era. Thus, in Last of the Red Hot Lovers, Simon added, perhaps inadvertently, a serious quality to his comic writing. It was not, however, a seriousness that all the critics considered profound, subtle, or artistic.

Brighton Beach Memoirs

First produced: 1982 (first published, 1984)

Type of work: Play

Problems are caused by having too many relatives live under one roof, but they are resolved, and a young boy comes of age during the process.

Brighton Beach Memoirs is about the Jeromes, a Brooklyn family in the late Depression era (1937), and the financial difficulties they face when three relatives join the household. For three and one-half years, Kate Jerome’s sister Blanche Morton and Blanche’s two teenage daughters, Laurie and Nora, have lived with the middle-class Jeromes. Although the arrangement is basically amicable, new financial tensions culminate in hard words between Kate and Blanche. Fortunately, the argument teaches Blanche about independence, and the play ends happily, with Blanche making plans to move and with the two sisters closer than ever.

Brighton Beach Memoirs does not really focus on this story of sibling love, however; rather, it is what Simon calls his first “tapestry play.” In all of Simon’s previous plays, he focused on two or three characters and made the other characters peripheral. Here, there is a sense that each character’s story is told with similar emphasis.

Jack Jerome struggles to balance all of his familial roles, as husband, father, and surrogate parent for Laurie and Nora. Stanley Jerome, the eldest son, achieves adulthood by learning from his errors in judgment. Nora Morton, the eldest daughter, gives up illusions of easy fame and fortune as a Broadway showgirl, accepting a closer relationship with her mother and a more responsible familial role, while Laurie Morton, the sickly and highly pampered youngest daughter, will clearly profit from a less indulgent treatment of her illness. A slightly greater dramatic emphasis is perhaps given to fifteen-year-old Eugene Jerome, Simon’s autobiographical alter ego, who serves as the play’s charming narrator. Eugene comes of age in the play, leaving puberty behind as he confronts sexual feelings for his cousin Nora.

As the first play in Simon’s autobiographical trilogy, Brighton Beach Memoirs decisively raised the critical opinion of Simon’s comedies because the play was not at all dependent on one-liners. Its laughter was less boisterous and explosive, becoming warmer, more gentle, more related to character and situation, and more sentimental. Take, for example, one of the first big laughs in the play. Eugene is banging an old softball against a wall, and his mother asks him to stop because Aunt Blanche is suffering from a headache. Eugene begs for a few more pitches because it is a crucial moment in his imaginary replaying of a Yankee World Series game.

When he finally has to give in, he “slams the ball into his glove angrily” but then “cups his hand, making a megaphone out of it and announces . . . ’Attention, ladeees and gentlemen! Today’s game will be delayed because of my Aunt Blanche’s headache’” This humor provokes a smile or chuckle rather than a guffaw; it directs warm and sentimental feelings back toward the character. While there are many one-liners in Brighton Beach Memoirs, they come after the tone of the play has been set and are absorbed by the play’s emphasis on character development and narrative.

Building on the more delicate seriousness achieved in Chapter Two, Brighton Beach Memoirs displays a Simon capable of creating moments of genuine tenderness, as in the scene between Laurie and Nora that begins with “Oh, God, I wish Daddy were alive” and ends with the image of Nora searching the deceased father’s coat pocket for her usual gift. Many critics responded appreciatively, lauding Simon’s new direction. For others, however, the overall effect of the play was still sentimental rather than convincingly serious. Blanche’s fear of intimacy after the death of her husband was easily resolved, for example, and Eugene’s obsession with sex, although cute, was hardly profound.

Biloxi Blues

First produced: 1984 (first published, 1986)

Type of work: Play

Eugene Jerome emerges from his time in the Army emotionally and sexually mature and already started on his writing career.

The second play in Simon’s autobiographical trilogy, Biloxi Blues continues the saga of Eugene Jerome’s coming-of-age as he survives ten weeks of Army basic training in 1943. The play opens in a railroad carriage as five draftees travel south toward the Army base in Biloxi. Eugene introduces each character to the audience by reading from the “memoir” in which he records his thoughts—throughout the play, Eugene comments on the action by speaking directly to the audience.

The scene shifts to a barracks, where a drill sergeant introduces the crew to military discipline by finding arbitrary reasons for ordering them to perform one hundred push-ups and forcing them to down every morsel of unappetizing food. Simon uses humor to make serious points. Admitting the need for strict discipline, he remarks: “If nobody obeys orders, I’ll bet we wouldn’t have more that twelve or thirteen soldiers fighting the war. . . . We’d have headlines like, ’Corporal Stanley Lieberman invades Sicily.’”

More than in previous plays, Simon explores significant themes. Eugene and his fellow Jew, Arnold Epstein, encounter prejudice and endure anti-Semitic remarks. When a fellow soldier is arrested for engaging in homosexual activity, the rest of the squad expresses compassion over his probable prison sentence (perhaps unrealistically, considering the prevalent homophobia of the 1940’s). The soldiers at first believe that Epstein is the guilty homosexual, having read Eugene’s memoir in which he speculated about Epstein’s sexuality. Eugene is left feeling guilty for writing down his suspicions. He learns the difference between sex and love during a weekend leave at the close of his training. In one scene, he clumsily engages in sex for the first time with a prostitute. In another, he meets a beautiful, literate, and witty southern belle at a dance, falls in love, and decides that loveless sex is flavorless.

The central theme of the three autobiographical plays is Eugene’s maturation into a successful writer. At the start of Biloxi Blues, he blithely records his observations and thoughts in his memoir, oblivious of the possible consequences of the act. The dismay of his barracks mates when they discover his notebook demonstrates that words have the power to hurt. The reaction of the squad to his suspicions about Epstein brings recognition that anything written down magically acquires an aura of reality. Epstein’s rebuke, when Eugene tears up the offending page, that compromising one’s beliefs is the road to mediocrity, reinforces the message—a responsible writer thinks and gets it right the first time.

In the closing scene of the play, the squad is once again in a railroad car, leaving Biloxi for war service. Eugene’s final remarks to the audience describe the later experience of the characters. He never saw battle. Injured in an accident in England, Eugene was assigned to the Stars and Stripes soldiers’ newspaper. At war’s end, he is well on his way to becoming a professional writer, aware of his career’s ethical responsibilities.

Lost in Yonkers

First produced: 1991 (first published, 1991)

Type of work: Play

Two young boys spend ten months in the care of a strict grandmother, who dominates a severely dysfunctional family.

The year is 1942; the scene is the living and dining rooms of Grandma Kurnitz’s apartment above Kurnitz’s Kandy Store in Yonkers, New York. Two young boys, Jay and Arty, wait in the living room while their father, Eddie, asks Grandma in her bedroom to take the boys for a year; he needs to travel to earn money and repay loan sharks from whom he borrowed to pay for his dead wife’s cancer treatment.

The boys fear their grandmother, who walks with a limp, her foot having been crippled during an anti-Semitic demonstration in her native Germany. She is convinced that only hardness can succeed in the world, and her sternness in raising her four surviving children has psychologically damaged them. Eddie trembles in fear when he speaks to her. Another son, Louie, has become a small-time gangster and is hiding from his associates in his mother’s apartment. Daughter Bella is mentally retarded. Gert gasps for breath when she talks to her mother.

The passage of time is indicated by blackouts during which Eddie reads letters to his sons describing his travels across the South dealing in scrap iron needed for the war effort. Act 1, after establishing the psychological problems of the characters, ends with a voice-over in which Eddie tells the boys how pleased he is that they are safe in the care of his family.

Simon mines humor from the play’s grimness. Critic David Richards remarked that, “Were it not for his ready wit and his appreciation of life’s incongruities, Lost in Yonkers could pass for a nightmare.” Uncle Louie praises his mother’s stoicism, noting that, although her injured foot aches constantly, she will not even take aspirin to ease the pain. Simon gets a surefire laugh when Arty later tells his brother, “I’m afraid of her, Jay. A horse fell on her when she was a kid and she hasn’t taken an aspirin yet.”

The dramatic center of the play is Bella’s struggle to find emotional support and fashion a life of her own, despite opposition from her mother and the incomprehension of her siblings. Bella appears a comic figure as she tells her relatives around the dinner table that she has met a similarly retarded usher at a movie theater and that the two plan to marry and open a restaurant. Louie mockingly asks whether what the usher really wants is her money, but Simon abruptly stops the audience’s laughter when Bella cries “He wants me! He wants to marry me!” Grandma does not deign to respond, but silently rises and goes to her bedroom.

Louie advances Bella money to open a restaurant, but her boyfriend proves too timid to leave the safety of his parents’ home, and her plan fails. At play’s end, when Eddie returns from his travels to reclaim the boys, Bella is still living with her mother, but she establishes some independence by inviting newfound friends to dinner.

Lost in Yonkers won a Tony Award for best play. Although Simon believed that his reputation as a comedy writer precluded his ever being given a Pulitzer Prize, the play also won the 1991 award for drama. Many critics consider this powerful dark comedy to be Simon’s masterpiece.