[Neil Simon's "The Prisoner of Second Avenue"] is full of the humor and intelligence characteristic of this brilliant comic playwright….

Here he is wryly contemplating the misfortune of a Manhattan family. The husband has lost his job, is fighting pollution and his neighbors, and faces the problems of living in a violent city. In fact, he is about to undergo a nervous breakdown. His wise and understanding wife is for a while the pillar of the family, but, after her job has gone and their apartment has been stripped by robbers, she, too, has a breakdown. It's a hard world, and the Edisons are soon aware of it.

This is surely the material for a serious drama, but Mr. Simon has a gift for taking a grave subject and, without losing sight of its basic seriousness, treating it with hearty but sympathetic humor. Because he has a talent for writing a wonderfully funny line, his capacity for insight and compassion is sometimes overlooked and he is thought of as merely a skillful gag writer but this ignores the quality that has made him our most important writer of stage comedy.

The most hilarious part of "The Prisoner of Second Avenue" is the incidental broadcasting of some local television news. It offers a number of hot items. You learn, for instance, that Gov. Rockefeller is in the hospital after being mugged in front of his New York home, that the Police Commissioner has been kidnapped, and a Polish ship has crashed into the Statue of Liberty. This certainly helps to establish the background of Mr. Simon's frenetic Manhattan.

There is a good scene in which the husband's relatives foregather to make idiotic plans to support him after his illness and the flow of humor is quite steady. But there are stretches wherein the comedy is slightly less than in his major vein. There is never a time, however, when it can be forgotten that Neil Simon, even when he is a bit under his peak, can write rings around all the other American dramatists specializing in humor. He demonstrates the fact again here.