As The Prisoner of Second Avenue begins to unfold, it's clear that Mel Edison … is your prototypical middle-class New Yorker. A 46-year-old account executive who has lived six years in his 14th floor apartment …, he is beset by all the existential woes of the urban condition….

Mel Edison, in brief, is quite literally losing his sanity; and in establishing this condition, Neil Simon has done his best work to date…. If it is not a wholly successful play, it is a wholly admirable one.

In those opening moments, Simon catches the feel of New York existence, the sense of raw nerve ends rubbing crazily against each other, about as well as anyone ever has. If art consists in appropriating the stuff of everyday existence and stripping it down to essentials, he has made a mad, dissonant art form out of ordinary urban clay. His concern is reminiscent of Little Murders, but where Jules Feiffer saw the urban world in terms of surreal, unseen, almost Godlike forces at play, Simon sees it as a congeries of tangible, petty irritations. Feiffer's Alfred has been deadened by the city, stripped of all his responses. Simon's Mel still greets each successive indignity with a wisecrack, although he knows it does no good. He has only to turn on his television … to hear of an endless parade of strikes, muggings, abductions, and other catastrophes that make his circumstances pale by comparison.

Still, those circumstances grow worse. His apartment is robbed—denuded of money, clothing, liquor, and TV set…. And in an economy move, he is fired from his job.

At this point Mel's predicament begins to seem a good deal less laughable than it looked at the outset, and Simon wisely cools the play down, forcing your sympathy for a man who is in fact at the brink of mental collapse. Simon has attempted this tragicomic blend before—notably in the first playlet of Plaza Suite, the first act of Last of the Red Hot Lovers, and almost all of The Gingerbread Lady—but he is singularly successful here because he has set you up so well. His evocation of the daily harassments in urban life has been so meticulous, so concrete, that you know the battered condition of Mel Edison's mind as you have known little else in the Simon canon.

And then Simon does an unfortunate thing. As Mel stands on his balcony during a shouting match with an upstairs neighbor, he gets a bucket of water dumped on him. Actually, it's not a bad metaphor—the crowning insult, all that—but in this context, in this play by this playwright, it shatters the mood. It's okay, Mabel; we can start laughing again. Curtain.

The second and last act is a mixed assortment. At the outset, Mel has been out of work seven weeks and his wife … has gone to work to support the two of them. It is a devastating, funny portrait of a bored and useless man that Simon paints here, shading slowly toward Mel's total mental collapse. Yet the collapse itself is overdrawn and improbable, and again the playwright draws laughs where he needs them least.

Did he perhaps intend to create a laughable breakdown? I don't think so, for he follows it with a break-the-ice sort of family conference at which Mel's brother and sisters agree to furnish him X amount of dollars toward his recovery—so long as X is very small. Another devastating scene, this, and matters proceed briskly to the final curtain, at which—you may have guessed it—Mel is doused for a second time. And by this point, Neil Simon is sounding very much like Jules Feiffer, for Mel and Edna—like Alfred—ultimately conclude that if you can't beat urban insanity, you might as well join it. At the final curtain they stare out from their tastefully upholstered sofa, as alone and indomitable as the couple in American Gothic, awaiting their revenge.

This is a different Neil Simon than the one who used to laugh just for the hell of it; if you want to know how different, I refer you to The Comedy of Neil Simon, an anthology of work from Come Blow Your Horn to Last of the Red Hot Lovers. Yet in another sense he's not so different; in a sense Neil Simon's journey is the journey of many of us over the past several years.

There's a clear connection, after all, between the 6th floor, walk up love nest of Barefoot in the Park, and the 14th-floor express elevator strait jacket of The Prisoner of Second Avenue. Mel and Edna Edison could be the Corie and Paul Bratter of that 1963 comedy grown up, but the timing is wrong. Mel and Edna have children in college. Wait, however. Suppose we assume that Corie and Paul didn't move into their loft in 1963, but in 1953? Then it all works out.

And they did, you know, for the fact is that comedy in 1963 dealt with a world that had stopped existing for almost everyone but newlyweds and comedy writers. Simon and his comperes had their details right, but the mood was wrong, their characters still believed in the perfectibility of man and his works, although many people in real life did not. Today, however, the message reaches us a hundred times a day. And so the toilet that was cute in Barefoot in the Park, flushing only if you pulled the handle up, has become a gurgling monster in The Prisoner of Second Avenue, refusing to stop flushing until the handle is jiggled.

This is the key to the change in Neil Simon along with the change in many of us. In eight years, that damned toilet has been fixed tens of times, and it still doesn't work. Nothing works. Or as Edna Edison puts it: "Is the whole world going out of business?"

Yet there are still people who choose to ignore all this, who visit a Neil Simon play in the expectation of recapturing the world of Barefoot in the Park, of guffawing mindlessly at unreal and untroubled people. That is why the twin dousings in The Prisoner of Second Avenue are so unfortunate: Coming from Neil Simon, the old boffmeister, they trigger an avalanche of brainless and cruel laughter that I'm convinced Simon did not intend. I must ask you to forgive the cliche here, but at these moments, and during Mel's crackup as well, Simon is asking us to laugh because it hurts too much to cry. But that's not the kind of laughter he's getting.

It's a shame. Directed … and performed to near perfection … The Prisoner of Second Avenue is a much better play than it likely will receive credit for being.