Everybody has to make a separate peace with Neil Simon. Mine came when I decided he was really an abstract artist who used gags the way Mondrian used little cells of color—a good Simon play was a formal construct in which the gags were in pleasing tension with one another. The subjects—odd couples, red-hot lovers, sunshine boys—were really only different ways of arranging the Mondrian gag-colors into different patterns. Since having this momentous insight into the Simon gestalt, I can enjoy his plays like any other Simon fan. As a good American. I want to be a Simon fan and this is the way that works for me. At least it did until "I Ought to Be in Pictures" came to Broadway.

This play can't be Mondrianized. It's got little gag-dabs running through it, but not nearly enough to make a true Simondrian. It looks, God help us, as if Simon MAY NOT WANT TO BE FUNNY ANYMORE! He may just want to be serious first, and funny second. But as a scholar of comedy, Simon should know that funny men can only be serious if they're funny first. At least it's got to be a dead heat, as it was in "Chapter Two," where funny and serious met on equal terms like that old Chinese vaudeville team Yin and Yang.

Another of my momentous theories is that great popular comic talents, like Chaplin and W. C. Fields, use comedy as a means of embracing, yet transcending, sentimentality. This is a suspenseful process, as watching Chaplin arm-wrestle sentimentality in "City Lights" makes clear. In "I Ought to Be in Pictures," Simon arm-wrestles sentimentality and you can hear his humerus crack. And Simon with a cracked humerus is a sad spectacle.

Simon's theme of a 19-year-old girl who barges in on the father who hasn't seen her in sixteen years could have been funny and touching as hell. At times it is funny and touching—but very few times and never as hell. The father, Herb, has been a Hollywood scriptwriter since walking out on his family. But he can't hack the scripts anymore and even his understanding girlfriend, Steffy, is getting fed up with their part-time relationship. Libby, the daughter, pops up in Herb's Spanish omelet of a house, fixes the house, fixes his car, fixes Herb and in the process fixes the gap in her life which she's temporarily filled by talking to her dead but still wise grandmother.

With material like this you have to work against it: bite it and make it bite back. Sometimes Simon finds a gag that's funny because it draws a drop of blood, as when Herb, frazzled by his long-neglected daughter's invasion, wails, "I don't even know how she found me. It took them twenty years to find Eichmann." But mostly Simon simply milks his scenes for their bottom-line emotion, which comes out as the mawkish camouflaged by the raucous. (pp. 106-07)