“An Interview with Neil Simon,” in Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1991, pp. 153-76.

[In the following interview, Simon discusses his plays, his development as a playwright, how he writes, Hollywood, the role of the actor, and his disinclination to be a director.]

A critic has described Neil Simon as “relentlessly prolific.” By virtually any accepted standard, he is the most successful playwright in the history of the American theatre. In thirty years, his 26 Broadway shows (including revivals of Little Me and The Odd Couple) have played a total of well over 15,000 performances. When The Star-Spangled Girl opened in December 1966, Simon had four Broadway productions running simultaneously. Despite this popular success and general critical approval, Simon did not win his first Tony Award for Best Play until 1985 (Biloxi Blues), although he had won the Tony for Best Author of a Play for The Odd Couple in 1965. His most recent play, Lost in Yonkers, won both the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play in 1991.

Simon's Broadway productions include the plays Come Blow Your Horn (1961), Barefoot in the Park (1963), The Odd Couple (1965), The Star-Spangled Girl (1966), Plaza Suite (1968), Last of the Red-Hot Lovers (1969), The Gingerbread Lady (1970), The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1971), The Sunshine Boys (1972), The Good Doctor (1973), God's Favorite (1974), California Suite (1977), Chapter Two (1977), I Ought to Be in Pictures (1980), Fools (1981), Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), Biloxi Blues (1985), Broadway Bound (1986), Rumors (1988), and Lost in Yonkers (1991). His 1990 play, Jake's Women, closed before reaching New York. He has written the books for the musicals Little Me (1962), Sweet Charity (1966), Promises, Promises (1968), and They're Playing Our Song (1979). Besides the adaptations of several of his plays for the movies, his screenplays are The Out-of-Towners, The Heartbreak Kid, Murder By Death, The Goodbye Girl, The Cheap Detective, Seems Like Old Times, Only When I Laugh, Max Dugan Returns, The Slugger's Wife, and The Marrying Man.

Born, like George M. Cohan, on the Fourth of July, in 1927 in the Bronx, New York, he grew up there and in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan with his only sibling, his brother Danny. He early received the nickname “Doc” for his ability to mimic the family doctor. When their parents, Irving (a garment salesman) and Mamie (who often worked at department stores to support the family during her husband's frequent absences), divorced, the two boys went to live with relatives in Forest Hills, Queens, and Simon attended high school there and at DeWitt Clinton in Manhattan. After brief military service at the end of World War II, he worked for several years with his brother as a comedy writer for radio and television. In 1953, he married Joan Baim, a dancer, who died of cancer in 1973. His second wife was actress Marsha Mason; he is now married to Diane Lander. He has two grown daughters and a step-daughter.

This interview was conducted on January 23, 1991, in Simon's suite at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC, while he was preparing Lost in Yonkers (then playing at Washington's National Theatre) for its Broadway opening. The interview was transcribed by Drew Eisenhauer.

You always say that very early on you knew you wanted to be a playwright.

I wanted to be a writer very early on. It's not quite true about the playwrighting thing. I started writing the first play when I was thirty and got it on when I was thirty-three, so that's fairly old to be starting as a playwright.

Most young people want to write poetry or want to write novels. When you knew you wanted to be a writer, was it always writing plays that you wanted to do?

I started out with different aims and ambitions. I grew up in the world of radio so the first couple of jobs I had were in radio and then television. I think I was setting my sights for film. I'm not quite sure when I decided to do plays. I know when I actually did so which was after years of working on Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar, and The Bilko Show. I said I didn't want to spend the rest of my life doing this—writing for someone else—I wanted to do my own work. So I started writing the first play, Come Blow Your Horn, and it took me almost three years to do the twenty-some complete new versions before I got it on. When I did get it on, I said, “My God, three years!” and I was exhausted. I had only taken other little jobs just to make a living, since I had a wife and two children. But once the play hit, Come Blow Your Horn subsidized the next one which was a musical, Little Me, and that subsidized writing Barefoot in the Park, and then I was making enough money so I could do this full-time.

So, in a sense, your playwrighting grew out of writing for TV and radio in that writing for TV and radio was basically working within a dramatic form? That's what really led to the playwrighting.

Right. I started off just writing jokes for newspaper columns and things and then working on Your Show of Shows and Bilko. Your Show of Shows was writing sketches and Bilko was like a half-hour movie; so I was learning the dramatic form. Then I worked for about two years with Max Liebman, who was the producer of Your Show of Shows, doing specials. It was a very good education for me because we were updating pretty famous musical books of the past—Best Foot Forward and Knickerbocker Holiday. We would throw the book out completely and use the score; we would sort of follow the story line but use our own dialogue. So I was able to step in the footprints of previous writers and learn about the construction from them.

What was the purpose of those? Were they for television?

Yes. We did about twenty of them, two shows a month. One show would be a book show. A couple of them were originals; one was The Adventures of Marco Polo, and we used the music of Rimsky-Korsakoff. So I was really learning a lot about construction. I had made a few abortive attempts to write plays during that time—one with another writer on the The Bilko Show—and it was going nowhere. I always had my summers off because in those days we did 39 shows a year on television in consecutive weeks and you had something like thirteen weeks off in the summer in which I would try to write plays; and I would say, “Wow, this is tough!” Finally, I went to California to do a television special—for Jerry Lewis of all people. I had quit Your Show of Shows—it had finally gone off the air—and so I was free-lancing. I went out there for six weeks. In about ten days I wrote the whole show and I said to Jerry Lewis, “What'll I do, I've got all this time?” He said, “I've got other things to do. Just do what you want until we go into rehearsal.” And I started to write Come Blow Your Horn, which was almost a satirical or a farcical look at my upbringing with my parents. I was on the way but it took three years to do that, as I said.

As a child, and as a young adult, did you read plays and did you go to the theatre?

I went to the theatre. I read quite a good deal. I went to the library; I used to take out about three books a week, but they weren't about the theatre. It wasn't until I was about fourteen or fifteen that I saw my very first play, Native Son, the Richard Wright book and play.

A strange thing for a fourteen or fifteen year-old to go see, wasn't it?

There was a local theatre in upper Manhattan, in Washington Heights where I lived. It was called the Audubon Theatre. It used to be a movie house and then they used it for acts—sort of vaudeville acts but I wouldn't really call it vaudeville. They started doing that all over New York at the time when the theatre was truly flourishing. You not only played Broadway, you could go to Brooklyn and Manhattan and the Bronx and there were theatres that did their versions of plays that had closed on Broadway. So I went to this local theatre and saw Native Son and was mesmerized by what the theatre could do. I had also acted in plays in public school and in junior high school, so I had a little glimpse of that; but acting is a lot different from writing. I think that slowly, as my parents started to take me to the theatre more, mostly musicals (I remember seeing Oklahoma!; it was—for its time—so innovative and so original), in the back of my mind I thought about that. But all during those years I was working with my brother and I thought that the only way to write a play was to do it by yourself, because one needed an individual point of view. Even if we were to write about our own family background, his point of view would be completely different from mine, and so it would get diminished somehow and watered down. When I wrote Come Blow Your Horn, I never even told him about it. It meant that I would have to make a break with him after ten years of writing together. The break was pretty traumatic. It was worse than leaving home because one expects that, but this was breaking up a partnership that he started because he was looking for a partner. He doesn't like to work by himself, and he always noticed and encouraged the sense of humor I had. I didn't have a sense of construction; he had that, and I was wonderful with lines and with the comedy concepts. Finally, when I did Come Blow Your Horn, I knew I had to step away. Partly I think it had to do with my being married; I began to feel my own oats and wanted the separation.

Can you speak at all about plays or playwrights that impressed you, influenced you, early or late?

Well, it was any good playwright. I didn't have favorites. In terms of comedy, I guess maybe Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman. A play that neither one of them wrote, Garson Kanin's Born Yesterday, I thought was a wonderful comedy, and I liked Mr. Roberts too; but I was as intrigued by the dramas as I was by the comedies. It wasn't until sometime later that I decided what I wanted to write was drama and tell it as comedy. I was such an avid theatregoer, especially when I first married Joan. You could go to the theatre then twice a week and not catch the whole season on Broadway and even off-Broadway. Streetcar Named Desire probably made the greatest impression on me, that and Death of a Salesman. These are not comedies. Although I knew I was not up to writing a drama as yet, I thought when I wrote something it would be from a comedy point of view.

If you could have written one play that was written by somebody else, what would that play be?

The question has been asked a lot and I generally say A Streetcar Named Desire. I have a certain affinity for that play; so does everyone else in America for that matter, I think. Death of a Salesman I thought was maybe the best American play I've ever seen—but it lacked humor. The humor that I saw in Streetcar Named Desire came out of a new place for humor. It came out of the character of Stanley Kowalski saying, “I have this lawyer acquaintance of mine” and talking about the Napoleonic Code. It was the way he talked that got huge laughs, and I knew that this was not comedy; it was character comedy and that's what I aimed for later on. If I were able to write a play, an American play, I would say it would be Streetcar.

The same quality is present in The Glass Menagerie, too. That play also has some very funny moments in it, but they grow very organically out of Amanda and out of her situation.

Yes. Even in Eugene O'Neill, who really lacks humor, I found humor in Long Day's Journey, in James Tyrone's meanness with money—turning out the light bulbs all the time and being so cheap. That was a play that I said to myself when I saw it, “I could never write that but I would love to write like that,” to write my own Long Day's Journey. I have an oblique sense of humor; I see comedy—or humor, not comedy (there's a difference)—in almost everything that I've gone through in life, I'd say, with the exception of my wife's illness and death. Humor has become so wide open today that it's almost uncensored on television. It's all part of the game now. As I said, Long Day's Journey impressed me very much early on, and the writings of August Wilson impress me very much today. There's great humor in them and great sense of character and story-telling; it's almost old-fashioned playwrighting, in a way. There are not many playwrights who write like he does.

I think some of the humor in O'Neill comes from the Irish quality in those plays, the whole Sean O'Casey tradition of Irish drama where the humor and the seriousness are very closely juxtaposed; and I wonder whether there isn't something similar in the Jewish idiom, with humor coming out of serious situations. Do you feel that is a factor in your own plays?

I'm sure it is, but I find it a very difficult thing to talk about because I'm unaware of anything being particularly Jewish. This present play, Lost in Yonkers, is about a Jewish family but rarely is it mentioned or brought up. But the humor comes out of the Jewish culture as I know it. It's fatalistic; everything bad is going to happen. In the opening scene, the father talks about his troubles with his wife dying, being at a loss about what to do with the boys and so worried about how they're going to look well and be presented well to the grandmother. It's all out of fear; there's no sense of confidence, because he knows what he's up against. The mother is, I think, more German than Jew, because she was brought up in Germany, and her culture is German. So one doesn't ever get a picture that she was brought up in a Jewish home in which they paid attention to the services. I would doubt very much if they were Orthodox Jews. But it's there someplace, and it's so deeply embedded in me and so inherent in me that I am unaware of its quality. When I write something I don't think, “Oh, this is Jewish.” At one time I thought I did, that I needed Jewish actors, but I found that people like Jack Lemmon or George C. Scott or Maureen Stapleton were equally at home with my material and they gave great performances. I rarely work with Jewish actors now; there are very few of them in Lost in Yonkers. However, in making the film of Brighton Beach Memoirs, when we did not get Jewish women to play the mother and the sister, it didn't sound right. Blythe Danner and Judith Ivey, as wonderful as they are, did not sound right. To the gentile ear it may not sound wrong, but still the audiences are aware that something is not quite organic. They don't know what it is; they can't name it. The difference came when Linda Lavin played in Broadway Bound and was right on the button and had the sense of truth. I think it's true too with O'Neill. He doesn't have to have Irish actors but Jewish actors playing O'Neill would have to have a very wide range to be able to do it well.

You have always said you stopped writing for TV because you wanted control, because you wanted to be on your own, not to have network executives and ad men running your creative life. But didn't the same sort of thing start to happen after a bit when you started to write for the stage, where producers like Saint-Subber wanted you to write a particular kind of play?

Saint used terms that no longer exist; they come from the turn of the century. He talked about “the carriage trade,” those people, not necessarily Jewish, maybe New York society or wealthier people, who we wanted to appeal to as well. When I wrote Barefoot in the Park I think in an earlier version I made them a Jewish family without saying so. Saint said stay away from that because we're going to miss the carriage trade, so to speak; so maybe I was aware of it. Certainly it was in The Odd Couple, with Oscar Madison, only because Walter Matthau played it. I was aware of that in the beginning and then gradually got away from it until I got specifically Jewish when I was writing the autobiographical plays. In Chapter Two, something made me lean toward an actor like Judd Hirsch playing the leading character George because I knew the cadences and the attitudes came from me, so I thought that character had to be Jewish but I didn't call him Jewish. In these plays—I'm talking about “The Trilogy” (Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and Broadway Bound) and about Lost in Yonkers—they are Jewish families, you can't get away from it. Some plays are just not; Barefoot in the Park was not necessarily at all. The Odd Couple has proven not to be because it's the most universal play I've written. They do it in Japan as often as they do it here now. It's done all over the world constantly because it is such a universal situation. Two people living together cannot get along all the time and it made it unique that it was two men. It seemed like such a simple idea that you thought surely someone would have written a play about it, but no one ever did up until that time. It was the idea or concept that made it so popular and then the execution.

Which of your plays gave you the most trouble and which was the easiest?

Rumors gave me the most trouble because of the necessities of farce. One has to get the audience to dispel their sense of truth, and they must believe in the premise even though we know it's about three feet off the ground. It has to be filled with surprises, and it has to move at a breakneck pace. People have to be in jeopardy constantly; the minute the jeopardy stops and they can sit back and relax, it's like a train that runs out of steam. And it has to be funny every minute. It was like constructing a murder mystery, an Agatha Christie mystery in which you are kept in suspense, only it had to go at a much greater pace than any of Agatha Christie's stories. I wanted to do it because I wanted to try the form. In a sense I was buoyed by watching an interview with Peter Shaffer, whom I respect enormously. I think he's a wonderful playwright. Amadeus is one of my favorite plays, again a play with a great concept—an original one—about professional jealousy. The interviewer said, “Why did you write Black Comedy?” And he said, “Well, it was a farce, and everyone wants to write one farce in their life.” I had tried bits and pieces of it; the third act of Plaza Suite, with the father and mother trying to get the girl out of the locked bathroom, is a farce. But it only ran for thirty minutes and it wasn't a full-blown piece, so I wanted to try that. That was the most difficult. None of them come easy.

What happened with Brighton Beach was interesting. I wrote thirty-five pages and stopped and put it away for nine years; and when I came back to it, somehow the play had been written in my head over those nine years without thinking of it so I wrote it completely from beginning to end without stopping. But that's only the beginning of the process. You can never say any play is written easily because you write it once, and then you write it again, and then you write it again; then you have a reading of it, and then you go into rehearsal in which you write it ten more times. So they all present their difficulties. But I can't think of any one play where it was really easy, where I didn't have a difficult time with it.

Have your writing methods changed over the years? You say you wrote Come Blow Your Horn twenty times. Is that still true, that you write a play over and over again, or do you find that you're getting better at it?

If I do write it over and over and over again, it means that the play has some serious flaw. I wrote Jake's Women seven times, almost from beginning to end, before I put it on the stage; so I never really corrected the serious flaw. With this play, Lost in Yonkers, the first version was fairly close to what we have now. I did two more versions before we went into rehearsal but I had less trouble with the construction of the play. It just seemed to lead to the right thing. It has to do with the beginnings of the play, with how each of the characters is introduced and how each of them has his own problem. Manny Azenberg, our producer, has always said that if I reach page thirty-five it is almost always a “go” project. Sometimes I get to page twenty-five or so, and I start to look ahead and say, “What are you going to write about? What else could possibly happen?” I've come up with some wonderful beginnings of situations and don't always know where they're going but sort of know what they're going to be.

Billy Wilder, the director, once said to me (he was talking about a film but I think it applies to a play as well), “If you have four great scenes, you've got a hit.” He says if you don't have those great scenes then you're not going to make it. When I wrote The Sunshine Boys, the whole play came to me at once in a sense. Since I fashioned it somewhat (even though I didn't know them) after the careers of Smith and Dale, and got the premise that they had not spoken to each other in eleven years and then they were being offered this job to work together and didn't want to speak to each other, I said, well, they've got to get together. That's the first funny interesting conflict, then the rehearsal, then the actual doing of the show on the air. I knew that they could cause great conflict and problems with each other, and then there would be the denouement of finally getting together. I said there's those four scenes. I don't think about that all the time, but that time I knew where it was going—there was a play there—so I sat down with some sense of confidence.

Others just unfold themselves. When I was writing Lost in Yonkers, I knew I had these four characters in my mind. I had witnessed somebody who has this dysfunction of not being able to breathe properly and I never thought about using it; but it suddenly came to mind in this dysfunctional family which the mother has created. When you write you're always trying to catch up with your thoughts. They're ahead of you, like the carrot in front of the rabbit or the horse. If it's always there ahead of you then you know that each day that you go to work you will be able to write something. It's awful when you are writing a play and you get to page forty and you come to your office in the morning and say, “Well, what do I write today? Where does it go?” I want to leave it the night before saying to myself, “I know what that next scene is tomorrow” and I look forward to the next day.

How do you get started on a play? Do you usually start with an idea, or with a character?

First it starts with a desire, to write a play, and then the next desire is what kind of play do you want to write. When I finished Broadway Bound, I said I do not want to write another play like this right now. I've done a play that in degrees develops more seriously because I thought that Broadway Bound dealt more truthfully with my family and with the kind of writing I wanted to do than anything I had done in the past. I did not have an idea for the next one, and so sometimes you just play around with an idea. I said I wanted to write a farce, and I just sat down and thought of the opening premise. It literally started with how it looked. Most farces are about wealthy people. They're not about people who are poor because their lives are in conflict all the time. They must be satirical; you want to make jabs at them socially. These were all fairly prominent people, and I wanted them all to show up in black tie and their best gowns because I knew whatever it was that I was going to write they would be a mess at the end of the evening—either emotionally or physically—with their clothes tattered and torn. I thought of it as a mystery. I had no idea where it was going. The host had attempted suicide and was not able to tell them what happened, the hostess wasn't there, and there was no food: that's all I knew. I had read (I read a great deal of biographies of writers and artists) that Georges Simenon wrote most of his murder mysteries without knowing who was going to be murdered and who the murderer was. He picked a place, a set of situations, just something that intrigued him. I think almost anyone can sit down and write the first five pages of a murder mystery because you don't have to leave any clues. You just think of some wild situation that sounds interesting. It's only the really great mystery writers who know where to take it. The Thin Man is one of the most complicated books I've ever read. I don't think Dashiell Hammett is given enough credit. That's really literature, that book. What was your original question?

How you got the ideas for plays.

I never really can remember the moment, maybe with a few exceptions. The Odd Couple came out of watching my brother and the man he was living with at that time. They had both just gotten divorced, had decided to live together to cut down expenses, and they were dating girls. I said what an incredible idea for a play. Barefoot came out of my own experiences with my wife. Strangely enough, Barefoot in the Park started in Switzerland. The first version of it—this really happened—was when my wife and I went on our honeymoon to St. Moritz, Switzerland, met an elderly couple, and decided to go hiking with them. My wife then—Joan died in '73—was a wonderful athlete and she and the older man were practically jumping up this mountain while his wife and I staggered behind, and I was angry at Joan for being able to jump like a goat up this mountain. Then I realized that it had too exotic an atmosphere and I wanted to locate it in a place where one could relate to it more. I thought about that tiny apartment that we actually lived in that was five flights up and had a shower and no bath; it had a hole in the skylight in which it snowed. So I used all of those things. You don't know that when you're sitting down to write it. It's an adventure; it's really jumping into this big swimming pool and hoping there's going to be water when you hit.

How has the experience of writing musicals and writing films been different and why do you continue to do them when you don't need to? Why have you continued to write in collaborative situations and seemingly against the whole idea of wanting to be independent?

I do it because I think I have to keep writing all the time. Each year I want to be doing something. I wouldn't know how to take a year off and do nothing. I would feel it a wasted year of my life, unless I did something else productive that I love—but I haven't found anything. I think that even at this age I'm still growing and that I want to do as much as I can before I can't do it anymore. Again, I think, what do you want to do following what you have just done? I was about to start another play that I had in mind but I still haven't quite licked where it's going and I'm not ready to do it. It's not that I won't have anything on next year, but I won't have anything to work on. So I'm toying with the idea of doing a musical now which is like a breather, even though the musical is a much more collaborative and a much more debilitating effort than anything else in the theatre could be. The movies have been in the past—some of them—such good experiences that I was usually eager to do one again. The movie industry has changed enormously. I did ten films with Ray Stark. Nine of them were successful and one was terrible. But for all of them, Ray Stark was the producer; he always got me a good director, always got a good cast, and was really the blocking back for me, the runner, with the studio. I almost never had to deal with the studio. This last experience I had, The Marrying Man, was enough to make me say I never want to do a film again.

I did have good experiences doing The Heartbreak Kid and The Goodbye Girl, even Murder By Death. Murder By Death is not a great work of art but it's great fun. In my reveries I used to wish that I were older in the Thirties and in the early Forties and could write for Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy Stewart. One of the great thrills I had in Hollywood was when I met some of these people and they said, “Gee, I wish I could have done a picture with you!” When Cary Grant said that to me, I said, “Wow, what I've missed!” Those actors who were, I think, in some ways (the best of them) superior to some of the actors we have today, carried none of the weight that the actors do today. Now even a small star, a starlet, has something to say about the picture. I will deal with the director always, with the producer seldom but sometimes, the studio hardly ever, and with an actor never. I will listen to an actor's inabilities to find what he needs to accomplish in a part and try to accommodate that, but not because he wants to be portrayed in a certain way. On the stage Manny Azenberg and I must have fired eight to ten actors over the years because we found they were not fulfilling what we wanted. An actor's training is mostly with dead playwrights, so when they do the classics they don't expect any rewrites. I want them to feel the same thing. I rewrite more than anybody I know; I just do it over and over. I'm still giving pages and new lines on Lost in Yonkers and will do it until we open. But they'll always come to you and say, “I'm having trouble with this line. Can you think if there's another way of me saying it that makes it more comfortable?” I'll say, “I'll rewrite it if it makes it more comfortable for the character, not for you.” When they understand that then we can find a way to do it.

To give you a really good example of the difference between films and plays for me, a director of a play will come to me and say, “What do you think about this section? I'm not so sure that this is working. Do you think you could find something else?” And I'll either agree with him or disagree with him and write it or rewrite it, but he does nothing about it until I rewrite it. He'll even come to me about a sentence or a couple of words. That play is sold to the films, and he becomes the director. He shoots the film, then invites me to the first cut, and three major scenes are missing. I say, “What happened to those scenes?” He says, “They didn't work for me.” It now has become his script; it's not mine anymore. And the only way to control that is to direct your own films which I don't want to do. I'm not a director. I don't want to spend all that time. I love writing. I hate directing. I hate hanging around the rehearsals. I do it when I'm working and I need to do something, but just to stand there and watch—I don't want to do it. So I do the films, but I'm not really very happy with them. Musicals are something else, because when you work with some of the best people (I worked with Bob Fosse a number of times and I thought he was really a genius; I worked with Michael Bennett a few times, even a little bit on Chorus Line), that's great fun. That's like being invited to the party, so you just do it.

You talk about rewriting. When you're readying a play like Lost in Yonkers and you're doing the rewriting, to whom are you responding when you do the rewrites? Is it purely your own responses when you're in the theatre? Or do you also respond to critics, or the director, or an actor?

All of them. Not an actor so much, a director yes, a critic sometimes. If a critic says something that's valid, and especially if it's backed up by another critic who hits on the same point, I say, “I've got to address this.” When you're writing it over and over again and then you're in rehearsal and you're out of town and you start to try it, you've lost all objectivity. Now you need the audience to be objective for you (and they are totally) and you listen to them. Sometimes the actor will come to me and say, “This line isn't getting a laugh.” And I say, “I never intended it to.” They assume that everything they should say when the situation is comic should get a laugh. I say, “No, no, no, this is character; it's pushing the story ahead.” That never happens in any of the dramatic scenes in Lost in Yonkers. Very few of those lines were ever changed because they don't have the difficulty in expecting a reaction from the audience. I rewrite just watching what it is that I hear wrong. And sometimes I can watch a play and after about eight or nine performances, I say, “I don't like that.” There was a producer who once said to me, “Only look at the things that don't work in the play. The good things will take care of themselves, don't worry about that. Don't say, ‘I know this stuff doesn't work but look at all the good things I have.’” He said, “The bad things'll do you in every time.” So I concentrate on the bad things; and after I get whatever I think is unworthy of the play out, then I start to hear it more objectively. I stay away for two or three performances and come back and say, “We need something much better than that.” When you first see that play up on a stage for the first time in front of an audience, all you care about is that the baby is delivered and is well and has all its arms and legs and moves. Then you say, “OK, now starts its education.”

I teach a course in Modern American Drama, and many of the playwrights in the course, people like John Guare and Beth Henley, are considered by the “establishment” to be serious playwrights who write plays that contain comic moments. Neil Simon, on the other hand, is considered a writer of funny plays that are occasionally serious. That strikes me as unfair because, especially in the most recent of your plays, like “The Trilogy” and now Lost in Yonkers, the proportion of humor to seriousness is if anything less comedy than in, say, Crimes of the Heart.

Crimes of the Heart is a comedy.

Yes, but Henley is considered a serious playwright.

I don't consider it necessarily unfair. I just think it's inaccurate. Unfair means that I'm being picked on for not writing serious, which is better than comedy, which I don't hold to be true. For the most part, I think I have written, with the exception of Rumors and the musicals (starting even with The Odd Couple), a serious play which is told through my own comic point of view. There are no serious moments in The Odd Couple; but when I first sat down to write it, naive as this may be, I thought it was sort of a black comedy, because in most comedies up to that point, there were always women in the play and a romantic relationship. Here there were none; the relationship was between these two men. Plaza Suite, with a husband and wife getting a divorce after twenty-three years, was basically a serious play that had comedy in it. The audience at that time was so trained to laugh at what I wrote that, in Boston, Mike Nichols and I kept taking out all the funny lines in the first act—and they found other places to laugh.

I write with a sense of irony and even with lines that are not funny, sometimes the audience senses the irony when they are sophisticated enough and they see the humor. That's why I always need really good productions for the plays to work. I once met a woman who said, “You know, I've never been a fan of yours.” and I said, “Oh, that's OK.” and she said, “Now I'm a big fan!” and I said, “What happened?” She said, “Well, I come from”—it was either Wyoming or Montana—and she said, “I've only seen dinner theatre productions of your plays in which they would play all the plays on one superficial level. They played it all as comedy, and then I read the plays and I said, this isn't comedy at all.” I remember people walking out of Prisoner of Second Avenue confused because some would say, “This wasn't funny.” I didn't mean it to be funny; I thought it was a very serious subject, especially at that time. It was the beginning of people being so age-conscious with the man of forty-eight years old losing his job and finding it very difficult to start all over again which is true even today. That to me was a serious play that had a great deal of comedy.

I use the comedy in a way to get the audience's attention and then sort of pull the rug from underneath them. That's how I view life: things are wonderful, things are going along just great, and then a telephone call comes and just pulls the rug from under you. Some tragic thing, some tragic event, has happened in your life, and I say if it can happen in life I want to do that in the theatre. It took a long time to convince audiences and critics that one could write a play that way. I remember reading Lillian Hellman saying, “Never mix comedy and drama in the same play; the audiences won't understand it.” They say to me, “What are you writing?” and I'll mention something, and they say, “Is it a comedy?” I say, “No it's a play.” They say, “Is it a drama?” and I say, “It's a play. It has everything in it.”

When you look back over your career to date, how has Neil Simon changed as a playwright? In other interviews you've mentioned the idea of the tapestry play, that you're now writing about more than two people as the focus of the plays. I assume that's one way, but are there other ways that you see your plays changing?

Well, in a glacier-like way. They move slowly; I don't make sudden overnight changes. I think back to Chapter Two, which was the story of the guilt a man feels who has lost a spouse and feels too guilty or is made to feel too guilty by his children or other relatives to go ahead in another relationship. There were people who spent the next fifteen or twenty years or the rest of their lives never moving on with it. In my own case, I was encouraged by my daughters to move on when I met somebody else. But still you get that kick of guilt, not a high kick, a kick in the gut, of guilt much like the survivors of the Holocaust when those who lived felt guilty all their lives. So the man in the play was not able to give himself the enjoyment and the latitude of exploring this new relationship without always pulling in the guilt of being alive and his wife being dead. Around that point, it's what I started to look for in almost every play. I think if there's any change it's that way. It's not necessary for me to be conceived of as a serious playwright because the word is so bandied about I think that it gets misinterpreted, serious meaning the intention is lofty. It isn't any loftier than comedy can be, but I don't write a pure comedy anymore, with the exception of Rumors where I intentionally did. I try to write plays about human emotions. I don't write plays about society. I find I can't. They become very current plays, and I like plays to be able to last for fifty or a hundred years or so. These are plays that contain serious subject matter. Lost in Yonkers is very well disguised, not that I meant it to be, but I couldn't open up the play showing the tragic side of Bella. It only came out when she was confronted with this chance to better her life and she didn't quite know how to do it and didn't get the permission of her mother who was the one who stunted her growth in the first place. That has to be built to, and I see how the audience is taken by surprise as it goes on. If they leave after that first act, they say, “It's nice, it's funny, it's cute.” And then the second act just hits them so hard. It's what you leave the theatre with, not what's going on in the beginning of the play, that's important.

Perhaps this analogy will seem far-fetched to you, but one could say that it took O'Neill almost his whole creative life to write a play like Long Day's Journey, where, as he said, he “faced his dead at last.” He had started to do it with Ah, Wilderness! in a more light-hearted way. Ah, Wilderness! and Long Day's Journey are really the same play but one is weighted towards a comedic treatment and the other towards a more tragic approach. It seems to me that you could say the same thing about Brighton Beach Memoirs and Broadway Bound: Brighton Beach Memoirs is your Ah, Wilderness!, and Broadway Bound is your Long Day's Journey. You started to confront your family directly in Brighton Beach, particularly through Eugene's narration in a comic way, and then in Broadway Bound you did so much more seriously.

There was a really valid reason for that. With Brighton Beach my mother was still alive, so she could come and enjoy it and Biloxi Blues as well. She died after that so she never saw Broadway Bound. I would not have written Broadway Bound if my parents were alive. I couldn't have put them up on the stage that way. I don't think I put them in an unsympathetic light certainly, but in a truthful one in a way. I was probably harsher on my father than I was on my mother; at that time in our lives, I really think she was the one who caused the anguish in the family. But I have more of an understanding of him now having lived through some of the same things myself.

So you think it was basically the death of your mother that enabled you to write Broadway Bound when you did?

It freed me to do it. I reveal things about her, her inability to be close and emotional. I don't remember ever being hugged by my mother as far back as being a child. I always knew that she loved me, but she was unable to show emotion. I did talk about something that happened to my mother personally, that she was burned in a fire; the grandfather talks about that. I don't go into it in Broadway Bound but it must have affected their marriage very much—how she was scarred. She was actually scarred on the front, not on the back as in the play.

And you never could have done that if she'd still been alive?

No, I couldn't. When O'Neill wrote Long Day's Journey he put it in a drawer and said it couldn't be done until twenty-five years after his death, which didn't happen of course; his wife had it done. I sort of felt that way. Chapter Two was cathartic for me. It helped me get rid of my own guilt by sharing it with the world. But Broadway Bound was not cathartic. It was an attempt to try to understand my family and my own origins. It's a play of forgiveness, and I didn't realize it until somebody associated with the play—the set designer or a costume designer—said after the reading, “It's a love letter to his mother.” I had a very up and down relationship with my mother. I used to get angry at her very often, and I loved her too, but there was no way for either one of us to show it—and so there it is on the stage. I remember in real life once I gave a surprise birthday party for my mother—she really was surprised—and we brought out the cake. She couldn't smile or say, “This is wonderful.” She just looked at me as she was about to cut the cake and said, “I'm still angry with you from last week when you did such and such.” It was the only way she could deal with it. So when I wrote the play, what I had to do after listening to the first reading when I didn't have that scene about George Raft, I said I've got to show the other side of my mother, show her when she was happy. I like that when in the second act of a play, you begin to show what really is information that happened way before that, to give it late in the play.

Do you have a favorite among your own plays? The last one you wrote?

Yes, it's generally that. It suddenly becomes the one that you're working on; but when I think of my favorite, I think about what my experience was when I wrote it and put it on. Was that a good time in my life, in my personal life and in doing the play? With some of the plays I had terrible times doing the play yet the play came out very well; other times it was great fun doing it. I think the greatest kick I got on an opening night—when I knew I was sort of catapulted into another place in my life—was the opening night of The Odd Couple. It was accepted on such a high level by everyone. It was what you dream about—Moss Hart in Act One—the hottest ticket in town. That night was a terrific night!

What about as a craftsman? Which of the plays are you proudest of as a piece of writing?

Structurally I like The Sunshine Boys, and I like this one structurally.

The Sunshine Boys is my favorite Simon play so far because of the integration of comedy and seriousness and because of the organic nature of that integration. Maybe it's an accident of the subject matter because you're dealing with comedians.

You're dealing with comedians which gives you license for them to be funny. But the seriousness in the play was inherent too; it wasn't always written about because you knew that they were old, you knew they couldn't deal with things. One was really fighting for his way of life to continue, the other was quite satisfied to be retired and live in another way; so there was something classic about it. It just seems to hark back to another period in time. That play is done by more national theatres in Europe—in England or even Germany—because they relate to it in some part of their own culture, to the old vaudevillians and what's happened to them. They've died out. That's another play that sat in the drawer for six months after I wrote twenty-five pages of it until I had lunch with Mike Nichols and said, “I'm kind of stuck. I have a play.” I started to tell him the idea and he said, “That sounds wonderful!” That's sometimes all I need; that's like a great review. “You really like that, Mike?” “Yes.” And I went ahead and wrote the whole thing.

Can you think of plays that exceeded your expectations and plays that you had great expectations for that never reached them once you saw them on stage?

That's an interesting question because I think I always know what the reception is going to be. I'm rarely surprised. Sometimes I write a play knowing it's not going to succeed. There's a psychological subconscious will to fail after writing four or five hits—you don't deserve that much. I pick a subject matter that is so far out—something that I would not do right now. Not one that's more dangerous and that's taking more of a chance with an audience, but one that's almost guaranteed not to be commercially successful (not that I always know when it's going to be). The Odd Couple and Barefoot in the Park fooled me because they were so early in my career. I didn't know what to expect. When they were both such big hits, I was really shocked. But a play that I knew I wanted to write for a reason other than artistic or commercial success was something like God's Favorite.

God's Favorite was my way of dealing with my wife's death. It was Waiting for Godot for me; I could not understand the absurdity of a thirty-nine-year-old beautiful, energetic woman dying so young. It was railing at God to explain to me why He did this thing, so I used the Book of Job. One critic cried on television in his anger: “How dare you do this to the Book of Job!” Yet there were critics like Walter Kerr, a devout Catholic, who loved it, just adored it. And so I wasn't too surprised that we weren't a major success, but I learned in hindsight that it was not a Broadway play. It should have been done off-Broadway as Fools should have been. Fools I did in a way like Rumors. Again it was farce in a sense. I just loved the premise. It's almost Hebraic culturally like the towns written about by Sholem Aleichem in which there were stupid people (without ever going into the reasons why) and I had a curse in my town. I thought it was good. Mike Nichols came up and did it; we had a good time. If we had done it in a small theatre, it would have been fine—Playwrights Horizons or something like that—but not with the expectations of a Broadway audience paying whatever it was at the time, expecting a certain kind of play.

I remember when we did The Good Doctor, which was another play written during my wife's illness when they discovered that she would not live. I was just sitting up in the country and I wanted to write to keep myself going and I read a short story by Chekhov called “The Sneeze”; and, just to kill time, I dramatized it. And I said, “Gee, this would be fun, to do all Russian writers and do comic pieces—or non-comic pieces—by them.” I couldn't find any, so in order to give unity to the evening I decided to do Chekhov because he had written so many newspaper pieces where he got paid by the word and I found as many of them as I could. Then when I tried them out of town some of them didn't work, so I wrote my own Chekhov pieces and some of the critics pointed them out and said, “This one is so Chekhovian.” which wasn't his at all! I don't mean that as flattery to me but as not knowing by some of the critics. I remember a woman in New Haven coming up the aisle and she said to me, “This isn't Neil Simon.” So I asked, “Do you like it or do you not like it?” She said, “I don't know. It's just not Neil Simon.” I have to overcome their expectations of me so that they don't get to see what they want to see. It's like going to see Babe Ruth at a baseball game; if he hits two singles and drives in the winning run, it's not a Babe Ruth game.

How do you feel about the current relationship between the theatre and film and TV? It's a cliché that television is ruining the theatre, that we are a culture of filmgoers not theatregoers. Do you feel those are valid kinds of observations? You once said you thought the biggest obstacle to theatre was the price of theatre tickets. Do you think it's really that?

That's one of them. It's only one of them. No, there's enough money around, I think, for people to go to Broadway theatre. I think we've lost the writers more than anything. David Richards of the New York Times recently said to me, “Do you realize you may be the only one left around who repeatedly works for the Broadway theatre?” And I said, “Well, they're all gone.” Edward Albee hardly writes at all. Arthur Miller has grown older and writes occasionally for the theatre but rarely for Broadway; it's usually for Lincoln Center or someplace else. David Mamet now would rather direct and write his own films. Sam Shepard was never a Broadway writer. There are no repeat writers—the Tennessee Williamses, the George S. Kaufmans, or even Jean Kerr in terms of comedy. You talk to anybody today, especially in California, and they will use writing as a stepping stone to becoming a director. They want to be directors; it has to be about control. Even a promising young writer like John Patrick Shanley has a big success with Moonstruck after he had small success in the theatre. We had said this is an interesting playwright, he does Moonstruck, and then he wants to direct—so he does Joe Versus the Volcano and I'm sure he just wants to keep on directing. Nora Ephron writes a couple of movies that are nice and now she wants to direct. I have no desire to direct at all. I see the soundness of it, in terms of movies. As I said before, I have no control over what goes on up on the screen or what's cut later. Between the director and the actors you lose all of that.

It's almost a mystery as to what's happened in the theatre. I think it's just changing. It's becoming regional theatre and the plays are in a sense getting smaller, not necessarily in their scope. Six Degrees of Separation is a wonderful play; I really like that play. I'm not so sure if it had opened on Broadway at the Plymouth Theatre that it would have gotten the kind of attention, the demands for seats. It's viewed from a different perspective when it's presented in an off-Broadway atmosphere. You see what happens when they transfer plays. One of the few that transferred fairly well was The Heidi Chronicles, but even when you're watching The Heidi Chronicles, you say this isn't really a Broadway play. That could be a misnomer too because it makes it sound crass and commercial, but Amadeus is a Broadway play and I think it's a great play. I think most of Peter Shaffer's plays are wonderful plays: Five Finger Exercise and the one about the Incas, The Royal Hunt of the Sun. Tennessee Williams didn't write off-Broadway plays except at the end of his career when the plays got smaller in their scope. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a beautiful play, but it's got size to it, and there is no one around who does that anymore. It's changed, I guess maybe the way painting has changed. I don't know who the great portrait painters are anymore if they exist at all. I think it's economics that changes it. In the theatre now they are catering to an international audience. Who comes to America now but the people who have money—the Japanese or the Germans? They don't all understand English but if they go see a musical like Cats they don't have to. Even Phantom of the Opera—if you don't understand it you can still enjoy it. If a play runs two years it is amazing. Most musical hits will run ten years now. You can't get Cats out of that theatre. Phantom will be there forever. It will be interesting to see what happens with Miss Saigon because it has this amazing anti-American number. When I saw it in London, you could almost cheer it, but if when it opens in March this war is still going on there may be some repercussions.

One of the things that occurred to me when I was watching Lost in Yonkers the other night is that you're one of the cleanest playwrights I know, even though you write about very intimate things.

You write to what fits the play. There are all sorts of four-letter words in Rumors because these are very contemporary people. In Lost in Yonkers, you're dealing with the 1940's and you're not only trying to emulate a play that might have existed in that time, but certainly what life was like at that time. And that kind of language, street language, I at least didn't hear that much. I never heard it at home, except maybe in a violent argument between my mother and father. It's interesting to watch playwrights like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller who never resorted to that language but found another language that was more potent. In doing The Marrying Man with Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin, which was just an awful experience, she did this scene in which she was sitting in a box at the opera in Boston. She used to be Bugsy Siegal's girlfriend but is found by this guy who's a multimillionaire and they get married; they're forced to get married through no intention of their own. Later on, they fall in love and get remarried. She's sitting in Boston and a man in the box is annoying her as she's sort of kissing the ear of Alec Baldwin. He keeps shushing her and she says, “Oh, come on, this opera isn't even in English, you can't understand it”; and it goes on and finally she adlibs, “Oh, go fuck yourself.” And I said, “Wait, you can't say that.” It had nothing to with my thinking that the language is offensive; it's so wrong for the character and for the tone of the movie. It's a movie that takes place in 1948. It's OK when the Alec Baldwin character and his four cronies are in the car. They use all sorts of language; but for her to use it in that place seemed so wrong for me. So it wasn't being prudish about anything; you've just got to use it where it's got some weight. Sometimes I would use “fuck you” or whatever it is once in a play, and it has much more impact than just using it all the way through. I like it when David Mamet does it sometimes like in American Buffalo. It is said so often that it is no longer offensive. It bothers some people I know; they don't want to hear it. But it never bothers me. I think he writes in such wonderful rhythms and cadences that the language is so important, so precise.

Linda Lavin once said à propos of Last of the Red-Hot Lovers, in which she was then appearing: “People come to the theatre to see their lives verified. They haven't been offended. The life they lead hasn't been challenged, it's been reaffirmed.” And I think you once said, “recognition” is what you'd like to see your plays be all about. Let me be a devil's advocate and say that one should come out of the theatre upset, as Edward Albee insists. I don't mean necessarily emotionally upset but something should have changed. You shouldn't have been patted on the head, you should have been disturbed. Lost in Yonkers can be a very disturbing play in that way.

Oh, absolutely.

Do you think you've changed in that respect?

Yes. I remember that when I did Plaza Suite and I wrote the first act about the husband who's having the affair with the secretary, the general manager for the play read it and said, “You can't do this play.” I said, “Why not?” He said, “Do you know how many men come from out of town and meet their secretary or somebody and come to this play. They'll be so embarrassed.” I said, “Good, that's what I want to do. I want to shake people up.” So I don't think I was trying to reaffirm middle-class values. In Last of the Red-Hot Lovers, the man was trying to have an affair. I found him sort of a pitiful character not even being able to break through that. I saw him as an Everyman in a way who finally had the courage to try to break out but didn't know how to do it. Sometimes those labels stick with you. But as I said it's a glacier. It moves along and it changes and it pulls along the debris with it. I don't think I write that way. I think why I get bandied about a lot by critics is because of the success ratio. There must be something wrong when it appeals to so many people around the world. They hate it that I've become a wealthy person from the plays.

You can't be any good if you're wealthy!

Yes. I remember at the time reading about Tennessee Williams's wealth, which was relative compared to today's market, but he was a fairly wealthy man because he was so successful. But he also took such chances with plays like Camino Real. He was a poet and he made his reputation on plays like The Glass Menagerie and Streetcar Named Desire. It's because I do write plays that for the most part are so popular. I never mind a bad review from a good critic who has liked some of the work in the past and then says, “No, you didn't do it this time.” I say that's valid and I can accept it. I don't expect a rave from Frank Rich. Frank Rich always will find fault. He's tough to figure out because he'll write a very middling review of Brighton Beach and talk about its faults and at the end of it say, “One hopes there will be a chapter two to Brighton Beach.” He finds fault with the play yet he wants to see a sequel to it! I had no intention of writing a trilogy, I just wrote Brighton Beach. When I read his notice I said, well, I'll do another play. You still don't think about a trilogy because if the second play fails, who wants to see the sequel to a failure? So I wrote Biloxi Blues, which he loved. It won the Tony Award, and so I did the third one which he again then finds fault with by saying, “I missed it being a great play.” He gives it a negative sounding review by saying it almost reaches great heights but doesn't.

You have to steel yourself. You become very thick-skinned after a while because you're out there naked and they are writing about you personally. They don't write about your work as much as who you are in the reviews. In a way I think the theatre has been changed a lot by critics who are now looking to make names for themselves. It bothers me that critics are hailed as personalities. Siskel and Ebert, good critics or bad critics it makes no difference to me, I hate that they are celebrities and have such power. Fortunately, there are so many people who write reviews for films, and people generally make up their mind to go see a film before they read the reviews. Not so with the theatre. The reviews mean everything. If you get a bad review in the New York Times, you can still exist but you've got to overcome it.

No, that's not exactly true. You can still exist. Neil Simon can still exist. A lot of other people can't with a bad review in the Times.

Well, it depends on the play. There have been a few that have existed without it, but it's very hard. Rich loved Biloxi Blues and the first day after Biloxi Blues opened we did an enormous amount of business, twice what we did on Brighton Beach Memoirs. But Brighton Beach Memoirs ran twice as long as Biloxi Blues. The audience seeks out what they want and Brighton Beach, next to The Odd Couple, is played more than any play I've ever done. There is something about the idealization of the family in that play that we all dream about. They know it's an idealization. It's like looking back on your family album and seeing it better than it was.

But it's not Ah, Wilderness! It's not that sappy.

Well, those were sappier days.

There's a lot of what happens in Broadway Bound underneath the surface of Brighton Beach.

Oh, yes—the mother's hurt when she finds out that the father has had this heart attack and that the boy has lost all the money.

What do you think you've done differently in Lost in Yonkers? What would you say has inched the glacier forward with this play?

I've written about much darker people than I ever have before. I've written about normal people in dark situations before—the death of spouses, the break-up of marriages (tragedies in proportion to their own lives at that time like in Brighton Beach), anti-semitism and anti-homosexuality in Biloxi. But in this play, I really wrote about dysfunctional people and the results of a woman who was beaten in Germany who in order to teach her children to survive teaches them only to survive and nothing else. That's much further than I've gone in any other play, so it's deeper. It's why I want to do a musical next year because I need really sure footing to go on to the next place. That doesn't mean I need to write about people even more dysfunctional, but as a matter of fact the play that I've been working on and haven't been able to lick quite yet is about two people in a sanitarium who have had breakdowns and find solace in each other almost more than in the doctor. I've written about thirty pages of it and I've had it there for two years and I'm anxious to write it, but each play comes when its time is ripe. Who knows if at some point I lose faith in the musical I'm working on, I'll probably go back and start to write that play. Right now, all I want to do is get out of Washington, go home, rest, come back, do the stuff in New York. Then I forget all about Lost in Yonkers. They all become a piece of the past for me. I've learned from them, and then they only come up in interviews like this when you talk about them. I don't think of the plays. I don't try to remember or go back or ever read them and see what I've done to see how I could do that again. I want to go to some other place. I'm just hoping that there'll even be a theatre enough around for people to want to go see these plays.