["The Prisoner of Second Avenue"] is a comedy about the breakdown of the system in New York. Superficially, it is similar to Simon's screenplay, "The Out-of-Towners," though the main events in the movie—the rapes, the muggings, the burglaries, the endless strikes—are just the background for the play. (In the play, they are described through the deadly technique of a television news announcer in the dark between scenes.)

The foreground of the play shows the breakdown of the system as it relates to the individual. It is about a 47-year-old man who has lived by the rules and achieved success by the rules, as indicated by the home, the possessions and the way of life demanded by the rules….

Suddenly, the system breaks down for him. The burglarizing junkies who have been terrorizing the city strip his apartment. The unemployment that has been raging through New York's publishing and advertising businesses reaches out and takes his job away. Stripped of these signs of achievement in which he so devoutly believes, he cannot handle the loss and so, finally, he breaks down.

Now the way I have put this, "The Prisoner of Second Avenue" would seem an indictment of the material system, a criticism of its values and a compassionately bitter example of what can happen to the foolish man who allows himself to live by it….

But Simon chooses to turn 180 degrees and make the exactly opposite point. The system is fine and what's wrong are the junkies, the strikers, the rapists, blaming the symptoms for the disease. He fears that without the system, everything will go: That relaxing the rules for the sake of humanity will be paid for in the collapse of family, marriage and sanity. This fear is strangling his impulses and his work, and it must be overcome if he is to fulfill his impressive potential.

I have been talking about the play in its most serious terms because they—Simon's problem and his possibilities—are what is most interesting about it. In fact, "The Prisoner of Second Avenue" has been written and staged as if it were mainly a comedy, and it has been neither written nor staged well in that respect….

[The result is that] instead of being the story of a man being a prisoner of the New York East Side system, it becomes five or six signposts of plot along a road crammed full of jokes. Nor are the jokes as funny as Simon can be (which is hysterical). More than ever he has shied away from the abstraction and eccentricity that is his wildest comic talent….

Simon, who opens the play with the problem of materialism and ends it with a materialistic solution, is … troubled. But he has come so close to the surface of his struggle that if he just takes it from here, he can be tremendous.