Neil Simon, Twayne Publishers, 1983, pp. 16-22, 34-42, 43-51.

[In the following excerpts, Johnson argues that the third act of The Odd Couple, is flawed because Simon has created such fully realized characters that he is unable to manipulate them convincingly for the happy ending he has contrived. Johnson also states that in Plaza Suite Simon is showing that outward success may not be enough, and that Last of the Red Hot Lovers does not meet the challenge it sets for itself to mediate the conflict between self-isolating cynicism and concerned human contact.]

THE ODD COUPLE

It is significant that Simon originally envisioned The Odd Couple as “a black comedy.”¹ He wanted to push beyond the simple comedy formats of Come Blow Your Horn and Barefoot in the Park. The tryout troubles that the new play incurred are also significant. On the first day of rehearsals, Simon realized that he had a weak third act. He began revising it that day and continued altering it throughout the long tryout period.

The play opens with a poker game held at Oscar Madison's apartment, the setting for all the scenes. Felix Ungar is late joining his friends, for earlier in the day his wife and he separated. Oscar, divorced from his wife, Blanche, offers to let Felix move in with him, and Felix accepts the invitation. The two men, however, immediately begin to get on each other's nerves. Oscar is lazy, disorganized, and sloppy. Felix is compulsively neat and a hypochondriac.

During another poker game two weeks later, the friction between the two men intensifies. A few nights later, Oscar arranges a double-date for Felix and himself with Cecily and Gwen Pigeon. On that evening, Oscar upsets Felix by thoughtlessly causing the meal Felix has cooked to burn up. Felix spoils everyone else's mood by delivering a morose monologue about his separation from his wife and two children. The next evening Oscar, still fuming, tells Felix to move out of the apartment, and Felix does so. But it is clear to Oscar's poker-playing cronies, back for another game, that Oscar feels guilty about throwing Felix out into the night. Then Felix returns with the Pigeon sisters to collect the rest of his things; the two women, taking pity on Felix, have invited him to share their quarters. Oscar is surprised, but relieved, and the two men part amicably.

Simon skillfully makes the weekly poker games an entertaining means of presenting expository information about Oscar and Felix and highlighting the domestic changes in the two men's lives. Simon underscores those changes by contrasting them with the sameness of the poker-game format. During the game in Act One, for instance, the audience quickly learns that Oscar is more than a bit of a slob. He offers his friends “brown sandwiches and green sandwiches.” When asked what the green is, he replies, “It's either very new cheese or very old meat.” One friend, Roy, commenting on Oscar's housecleaning inabilities, observes, “His refrigerator's been broken for two weeks. I saw milk standing in there that wasn't even in the bottle.”² Even though Oscar is a highly paid sportswriter, he owes the other players money. Through a phonecall from his ex-wife, the audience discovers he is three or four weeks behind in alimony payments. Because it is unusual for Felix to be late for the game, the other men worry aloud about him. By this means, Simon sketches in much of Felix's basic personality. Particular emphasis is placed on his hypochondria and other fears and on his compulsive desire for neatness.

After the other men leave, Oscar and Felix elaborate on their own personalities, particularly their faults. Felix speaks of coming home after his wife and the hired help had cleaned all the rooms and cleaning the rooms again himself. A good cook, he recooked all the meals. Oscar describes some of his own marital faults. He let his cigars burn holes in the furniture and he drank too much. He insensitively dragged his wife to a hockey game to “celebrate” their tenth wedding anniversary.

Still, the two men reveal more about themselves to the audience than they do to each other. Oscar, for instance, is not wholly the happy-go-lucky guy he appears to be. He humorously admits to his friends that he loves to bluff while playing poker. It becomes evident, however, that he puts up a front in other ways, too. Although he seems unconcerned about living alone, he tells Felix, “When you walk into eight empty rooms every night it hits you in the face like a wet glove” (244). When Felix remains hesitant about moving in, Oscar blurts out that he truly wants Felix to move in, and that he is not just doing Felix a favor. He says, “I can't stand living alone” (248).

Felix, too, gives himself away more than he realizes when he declares himself a better cook and, by implication, a better financial manager and housecleaner than his wife, Frances. He is so intent on listing his faults he fails to perceive that he is, in fact, almost entirely absorbed in himself. Unlike the audience, Felix is startled when told he is full of self-love, an observation Oscar makes when he states he has “never seen anyone so in love” (246) with himself as Felix is. This same shoe, however, also fits Oscar's foot. Oscar says he is impossible to live with; but he does not really believe this is so—else he would not invite Felix to come live with him.

In point of fact, for all the self-criticism the two engage in, neither man truly thinks he is such a bad guy. Each is tacitly convinced his good qualities far outweigh his faults. Moreover, each believes that some of the faults confessed to are actually either not faults at all or are faults bred and subsumed by virtues. Deep down in their hearts, both men believe they are by no means entirely to blame for the demise of their marriages. Coming full circle, Oscar asserts, “It takes two to make a rotten marriage” (246). Although not conscious of what they are doing, they think they now, by creating a happy “marriage,” are about to prove how decisively their good points eclipse their bad points.

They do not, however, live happily ever after. The first indications of trouble are the direct comments they exchange at the poker game in Act Two. Cleverly, Simon counterpoints the friction between Oscar and Felix by means of the other four participants in the card game. Vinnie and Murray, similar to Felix in temperament, appreciate the changes Felix has rendered in the apartment. They relish especially the striking improvement in the quality of the food offered. Speed and Roy, akin to Oscar in personality, are irritated by the innovations. Roy goes so far as to say he preferred things the way they were before Felix moved in. Felix's self-love prevents him from discerning how annoying his housekeeper's quirks are. Finally sensing Oscar's mounting anger, he says in surprise, “I didn't realize I irritated you that much” (259).

The double-date ignites the final blowup. Before the big evening begins, Felix tells Oscar he will cook the dinner for the foursome; he also promises not to dwell on his unhappy past. Elated, Oscar exclaims, “That's the new Felix I've been waiting for” (266). Oscar's high hopes for the get-together, however, prove unfounded. Almost as soon as he leaves Felix alone with the two women in order to make everyone a drink, Felix breaks his promise. Because he obviously thrives on brooding about his woes, he tells the women how lonely and unhappy he is away from his wife and children. As he verbalizes his feelings for the first extended time since the end of his marriage, the full weight of his sad situation hits him—so much so he breaks down and begins crying. The Pigeon sisters, touched by Felix's sorrow, become teary themselves. Returning to the “party,” Oscar finds three very somber people and becomes incensed at Felix. In order to hurt Felix, Oscar informs him that his London broil is ruined.

The whole matter of the food for dinner makes it clear that Felix is not the only one of the two men who continues to display unpleasant, annoying traits. One reason the meat is spoiled is that Oscar promised to be home at seven o'clock and then did not arrive home until eight—without bothering to inform Felix he would be late. Nonetheless, it still would have been possible for Felix to serve a succulent dinner if it had been served right away, as Felix had wanted it to be. But Oscar insists that they all have a drink first. To top it all off, while he is out in the kitchen mixing drinks, Oscar neglects to check on the London broil. In sum, Oscar is as uncaring as Felix is overly fussy.

When Felix's anger prompts him to declare he will not join Oscar and the ladies in the latters' apartment for the rest of the evening, Oscar says, “You mean you're not going to make any effort to change? This is the person you're going to be—until the day you die?” Felix responds with, “We are what we are” (284). In point of fact, neither man wants to change or thinks he should.

Despite the revisions Simon fashioned during the play's tryout run, the third act dips below the high quality of the preceding acts. Simon himself wrote that The Odd Couple is basically a sound play, but that the “seams show a bit in the third act. I rewrote it five times out of town. I think I needed one more town.”³ Because Simon is a master of the rewrite, it is entirely possible that, if allowed more time, he would have made his third act as fine a piece of work as the first two acts are. Even in its present form, the third act deserves praise.

The two men's final confrontation is thoroughly gripping. It is also quite funny. Oscar tries to bully Felix by declaring that everything in the apartment is his own; he concludes, “The only thing here that's yours is you” (286). Felix will not be intimidated. He reminds Oscar that he pays half the rent and then rattles Oscar by threatening to walk around in Oscar's bedroom. Oscar counters by commanding Felix to remove the plate of spaghetti from the poker table. When Felix needles Oscar for not recognizing that the food is linguini, not spaghetti, Oscar hurls the plate against the kitchen wall and states, “Now it's garbage!” (287).

Their confrontation peaks as Felix asks Oscar to be less vague regarding what it is about Felix that bothers him. Felix inquires, “What is it, the cooking? The cleaning? The crying?” Oscar answers, “It's the cooking, cleaning and crying” (288). Felix unloads on Oscar, describing him as “one of the biggest slobs in the world” as well as unreliable and irresponsible. Not to be outdone, Oscar states that he was merely a little dejected after living alone in the apartment for six months, but that now, after living with Felix for only three weeks, “I am about to have a nervous breakdown” (290).

Simon, however, did not wish the play to end with the two men angrily going their separate ways. He wanted a happy ending, an ending that left the audience still tickled by and fond of Felix and Oscar. To achieve this, Simon decided to have the two men part amicably, respecting each other as much or more than they did before they roomed together. Like the characters themselves, the audience is to believe that as a result of their living together, Oscar and Felix have had a positive effect on each other.

In an effort to create a change in Felix's character, Simon has Felix come out of his shell a little and release some of his long-suppressed anger and frustration. Oscar is so surprised by Felix's comparatively uninhibited behavior that he remarks, “What's this? A display of temper?” (289). When Felix believes his wife, Frances, has phoned the apartment, he instructs Murray, who answered the phone, to tell Frances that he “is not the same man she kicked out three weeks ago” (300). Simon indicates that Oscar has changed, too. Although Oscar suppressed whatever modicum of guilt he felt for causing his marriage to end in divorce, he now admits to feeling guilty about throwing Felix out of the apartment. A further indication of his change in personality, and an indication of Felix's effect on him, occurs at the very end of the play. Oscar—for the first time ever—reprimands the other poker players for their sloppiness. He protests, “Watch your cigarettes, will you? This is my house, not a pig sty” (301). Furthermore, both men acknowledge that they have helped each other. Oscar says that Felix should thank him for doing two things—taking Felix in and throwing him out. Felix responds, “You're right, Oscar. Thanks a lot” (299).

All the same, Simon's attempt to create a happy ending for a play that started out as “a black comedy” does not work. By the time he wrote this play, Simon had become too skillful at presenting realistic characters for him suddenly to reduce Oscar and Felix in the third act to puppets he could pull any way he wanted to. When he wrote Come Blow Your Horn, he could arrange his happy ending without a great deal of difficulty because, except for Mr. Baker, the characters were little more than slickly depicted, broad types. In Barefoot in the Park, Simon produced much more lifelike characters, particularly in Paul, Corie, and, most of all, Mrs. Banks. Consequently, it was harder for Simon to make the characters do whatever he wanted them to do in order to end the play on a cheery note. Hence the partially flawed resolution of that play.

Oscar and Felix are vivid personalities in the first two acts of The Odd Couple. There was no way that Simon could force these two characters to do whatever he wanted them to do in Act Three. The main point dramatized in Act Two is that Oscar and Felix have learned nothing from the failures of their marriages. They are exactly the way they were while married. Because they doggedly insist on asserting their considerable egos, it is abundantly clear they will never change. The “marriage” between them was bound to end in an angry “divorce.”

Although Oscar was largely to blame for the failure of his marriage with Blanche, he felt little remorse. That he would instantly be filled with intense guilt feelings about his “breakup” with Felix—a “breakup” for which he was at most only fifty percent to blame—is quite implausible. It is even more unlikely that he, the great bluffer, would almost immediately confess to his friends how guilty he felt. Nor would Felix sincerely assume a major portion of the blame. Rather, he would talk—endlessly, if allowed—about his “flaws,” but simultaneously make it clear that all his “flaws” were actually the result of his superiority to Oscar.

Walter Kerr brought the point home when he wrote, “Those two men haven't learned anything from their marital quarrels that will help them share an apartment now, and they aren't going to learn anything from their quarrels now that will help them next time around. … They aren't going anywhere, except into new failures.”⁴ Simon himself perceived this truth, although he did not proceed to honor his perception. In Act Three he presents an insightful exchange between Murray and Oscar. Having just banished Felix, Oscar is already worried about his friend, whom Oscar envisions wandering aimlessly through the streets all night. He tells Murray that the primary reason for his concern is that he was the one who sent Felix out into the night in the first place. Murray contradicts him:

Murray: Frances sent him out in the first place. You sent him out in the second place. And whoever he lives with next will send him out in the third place. Don't you understand? It's Felix. He does it to himself.

Oscar: Why?

Murray: I don't know why. He doesn't know why.

(296)

Simon shows the audience why. Neither Felix nor Oscar will ever live happily with someone else because they are both incapable of doing what Simon in Barefoot in the Park wisely suggested people should do. Neither man will compromise. Each is a willful egotist.

Simon, then, has to take “the blame” for creating two main characters who are so vibrantly alive they cannot be mechanically manipulated during the play's closing minutes. Nonetheless, like Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple is, overall, good in so many ways it easily overrides its third-act weaknesses. The play's high quality results not only from its superb delineation of two interesting individuals, but from the incongruous juxtaposition of those two individuals. As Howard Taubman stated, Simon's “instinct for incongruity is faultless.”⁵ It was, in fact, inevitable that Simon's plays move toward a major emphasis on the incongruous, for Simon sees incongruity as a primary feature of human reality. In his introduction to The Comedy of Neil Simon, he describes an argument his wife and he were having in the kitchen. In the middle of the argument, his wife “picked up a frozen veal chop recently left out on the table to defrost, and hurled it at me, striking me just above the right eye. I was so stunned I could barely react; stunned not by the blow nor the intent, but by the absurdity that I, a grown man, had just been hit in the head with a frozen veal chop.”⁶ So, too, one reason Simon writes comedies instead of tragedies is his acute awareness of how much of a man's life is riddled with comic incongruities.

Oscar and Felix's attempt to share living quarters, it can be argued, is the most captivating dramatization of incongruity Simon has yet created. The two men are wildly incompatible roommates. The humor ries out of their clashing personality traits and domestic habits—and out of how preposterous the very idea of their living together is. They, of course, see nothing incongruous about trying to room together. An awareness of the incongruous depends on a person's ability to remove himself far enough from a situation he is a part of to see that situation from a second, less subjective point of view. Self-love presents Oscar and Felix from obtaining this perspective. Indeed, the core of The Odd Couple is Simon's successful presentation of the serious dangers of self-love.

But perhaps the final triumph of Simon's play is that Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar—and Simon's whole concept of “the odd couple”—have become as much a part of our cultural folklore as Babbitt, Superman, Holden Caulfield, and Archie Bunker.

PLAZA SUITE

Both The Odd Couple and Promises, Promises indicate that Simon was gravitating toward writing comedies consisting of more than a stream of funny lines. Plaza Suite, a highly successful blend of humor and character study, completes the transition. Later, discussing his shift to this goal, Simon stated, “I used to ask, ‘What is a funny situation?’ Now I ask, ‘What is a sad situation and how can I tell it humorously?’”⁷

“VISITOR FROM MAMARONECK”

Plaza Suite consists of three one-act plays, all taking place in the same hotel suite. The first play, “Visitor from Mamaroneck,” depicts the marital situation of Karen and Sam Nash. Aware that her husband has become increasingly indifferent to her after more than twenty years of marriage, Karen suspects he is having an affair with his secretary, Jean McCormack. So, while their house is repainted, Karen rents what she believes to be the same suite that Sam and she stayed in one their honeymoon. She has bought a sexy negligee and has deliberately not packed any pajamas for Sam. Sam soon joins her, but is totally preoccupied with his looks and with completing a big business deal. When Miss McCormack appears with data containing an error, Sam decides the two of them must meet back at the office to check the problem out. After Miss McCormack leaves, Karen confronts Sam with the fact that their marriage is deteriorating and asks him if he is having an affair with his secretary. Eventually Sam confesses he is. At first Karen tells him she will accept his need for an affair with a younger woman; later, she asks him to end the affair. Although he loves Karen, Sam will not agree to her request and leaves to meet his secretary.

While Promises, Promises dealt with a husband and “the other woman,” this one-acter centers on the conflict between the husband and wife. Simon stresses two additional conflicts—the turmoil within the husband and, above all, the turmoil within the wife. Initially, Karen is trying solely to keep the lid on the situation. Her goal is simply to rekindle the love Sam and she felt for each other in the early years of their marriage. She believes that if she can do that, she can defuse any problems bred by the deterioration of the marriage.

That her plan is a calculated one does not mean she has attained a coolly detached view of her predicament. On the contrary, the tension Karen feels is readily apparent. Learning from the bellhop that a famous New York building has been torn down, she immediately applies this fact to her own situation. She says that is how things are these days: if something is old, it is torn down. Other facets of Karen's personality are quickly revealed. She is a scrapper, which prepares the audience for Karen's later confrontation with Sam. Indeed, she fights even when she is sure she will lose. Before Sam arrives, she orders some hors d'oeuvres over the phone, stressing that she does not want any anchovies. Yet she expects (justifiably, as it turns out) that she will be served anchovies all the same. It is equally plausible that Karen would suspect the truth concerning Sam and his secretary, for she is remarkably willing to confront the truth. The stage directions state, “Karen is forty-eight years old, and she makes no bones about it.”⁸ She looks in the mirror and declares, “You are definitely some old lady” (500). Karen's honesty, however, has done more than lead her to realize her marriage is in trouble; it is one of the basic reasons the marriage is in trouble. Her husband will not accept that he is aging, and he resents Karen's acceptance of middle age. He even encourages her to lie about her age.

With Sam's entrance, the plot focuses directly on the marital relationship. It becomes clear that Sam expects Karen to concentrate selflessly on his needs and desires, but that when she does so, he takes her for granted. He recognizes her individual existence only when she fails to aid him competently. Karen's perceptiveness and her desire for a particularly pleasant evening with her husband pull her in two directions. Her suspicions concerning the possibility of Sam's infidelity mount. For one thing, although Sam explains his gruffness with her by stating he has a bad headache, he is all charm while talking with Miss McCormack on the phone. He also sidesteps Karen's comment that she has seen less and less of him at night in the past month. Still, she resolutely resumes cajoling Sam.

The situation intensifies when Sam decides he must meet Miss McCormack back at the office. Watching Sam primp and shave in front of the mirror, Karen intuits that Sam and Miss McCormack have previously arranged to meet this evening. Crushingly disappointed that her plan for a special evening with her husband is collapsing, she asks him if he is having an affair with his secretary. At first Sam denies everything. Then Karen says that “if at this stage” of Sam's life he wants to have “a small, quiet affair with a young, skinny woman,” she would understand. Instantly Sam replies, “What do you mean, at this stage of my life?” (527).

Now the play scrutinizes Sam's character—for Karen has hit Sam where he lives. Earlier, Karen had lamented, “I'm not insane about getting older. It happens to everyone. It's happened to you. You're fifty-one years old.” Sam retorted, “That's the difference between us. I don't accept it. I don't have to accept being fifty-one” (521). Karen's newest allusion to his age leads Sam for the first time to open up to Karen—and to himself. He takes primary responsibility for their marriage turning sour. Next, he confesses, “When I came home after the war … I had my whole life in front of me. And all I dreamed about, all I wanted, was to get married, and to have children … and to make a success of my life. … Well, I was very lucky. … I got it all. … Marriage, the children … more money than I ever dreamed of making.” Puzzled, Karen asks, “Then what is it you want?” Sam blurts, “I just want to do it all over again … I would like to start the whole damned thing right from the beginning.”

Karen's response to this poignant disclosure may be interpreted as a gag designed to keep the play from becoming too serious. She says, “Well, frankly, Sam, I don't think the Navy will take you again.” It is a funny comeback. But it is more than that. Her remark reminds Sam that he cannot go back in time. It asks him to accept his present situation. For Karen senses that if Sam will accept the reality of his situation, their marriage has a chance.

Consequently, when Sam replies in turn, “Well, it won't be because I can't pass the physical,” Karen is deeply shaken. She realizes that their marriage is in an even more precarious state than she previously surmised it was. She bluntly, unhumorously says aloud exactly what she is thinking: “I think you want to get out and you don't know how to tell me” (529). When Sam starts to leave, Karen for the first time lashes out at him, demanding that he stay and discuss their situation. Rocked again when Sam confesses that he is having an affair with his secretary, Karen reneges on her willingness to go along with such a development.

Karen is caught in a cruel dilemma. She knows that if she does not battle to break up the affair, Sam, in his obsession to “keep young,” will become so enamored of Miss McCormack he will seek a divorce. Yet Karen is equally aware that if she pressures Sam to end the affair, she will become in his eyes a nagging, unattractive woman. She tells him she knows her criticism of him “makes everything nice and simple for you. Now you can leave here the martyred, misunderstood husband” (534). At her wit's end, she pleads with Sam to stay in the suite with her. Sam, however, will not let himself surrender to age. Although his awareness that Karen is a fine woman prevents him from deciding then and there to divorce her, he feels he has to leave—at least for this night.

Neither of them knows if he will come back.

“VISITOR FROM HOLLYWOOD”

In the second sketch, “Visitor from Hollywood,” movie producer Jesse Kiplinger arranges a meeting in his suite with his old high-school girlfriend Muriel Tate. Muriel, well aware that Jesse has become famous, is both intrigued and intimidated by his fame. She talks about leaving for home throughout the early stages of the conversation. After Jesse tells her that his private life is as much of a failure as his professional life is a success, Muriel relaxes. They begin kissing. Later, while Jesse starts to remove her dress, Muriel starts asking him gossipy questions about other famous Hollywood personalities.

As in the previous one-acter, Simon uses a familiar situation. The first story features the eternal triangle. The situation in this second one-acter is that of the cosmopolitan male's attempt to seduce the uncosmopolitan female. Simon breathes new life into this situation by focusing not on the act of seduction, but on the motivations of the seducer and the seduced. Simon shows how complicated a simple seduction can be. The seduction is simple because both Jesse and Muriel want it to take place. What complicates matters is that each wants more out of the seduction than a sexual interlude.

Initially, Muriel is so impressed by Jesse's fame she is uncertain she can be a satisfactory sexual partner. After they kiss, she nervously asks Jesse, “Was it good?” Startled, he only after a moment or two has the presence of mind to reply, “It was a superb kiss” (547). Another problem arises when, early in the conversation, Jesse brushes aside Muriel's questions about glamorous Hollywood because he does not want to be reminded of his life out there. He wants to recapture the manly confidence he felt when young. Disillusioned by his personal experiences while in California, he sees Muriel as a symbol of his comparatively more innocent pre-Hollywood life. After their high-school years, however, Muriel's life became dismally mundane; and she is not at all interested in reliving “days gone by.” Jesse's appeal for her is precisely that he symbolizes the Hollywood life-style she fantasizes about. When, for instance, he blurts out that his newest picture is “a piece of crap” (546), Muriel will have none of it. She quotes how much money it has made and ponders its chances of winning an Academy Award.

As a result, for a good while, no seduction takes place. Instead, each of them continues to pursue his or her private obsession. Jesse elaborates on his renewed interest in Muriel by telling her she is “the only, solitary, real, honest-to-goodness, unphoney woman” (548) he has been with since he went to Hollywood seventeen years ago. He tells her he remembers exactly what she wore the day he left her to go to Hollywood. He begs her never to change from “the sweet, simple way you are” (550). Muriel does not follow Jesse's lead. When he speaks of the day he left for California, Muriel states, “I remember when your first picture came to Tenafly” (549). All her reflections concerning their high-school years and her life thereafter relate directly to his later success. She informs him that their old high-school friends tease her, telling her, “If I married you instead of Larry, I'd be living in Hollywood now” (549). In response to his pleas that she never change, she says, “Do you know Frank Sinatra?” (550). More than a little drunk on vodka stingers, Muriel blurts out, “I suppose you'll go back to Hollywood and have a big laugh with Otto Preminger over this” (551).

Jesse's preoccupation with himself finally subsides enough for him to become aware of Muriel's fear of inadequacy. Quickly he begins reassuring her that he has only the warmest feelings for her. Then, as a further means of wooing Muriel, but also because he sincerely needs to express the unhappiness churning within him, Jesse tells Muriel the truth about himself. He confesses he has been humiliated both financially and sexually by his three former wives. Staggered by these defeats, he yearns for the unthreatening atmosphere of innocence he is convinced existed back when he dated Muriel. He wants this so much he ignores a blatantly obvious fact—namely, that Muriel is not now (if she ever was) the uncomplicated high-school sweetheart he persists in believing she still is. He also does not confront the pathetic contradiction in, on the one hand, his delight in Muriel's supposed innocence and, on the other hand, his desire to have sexual intercourse with her in order to reassure himself about his sexual prowess.

Jesse's confession provides the pivotal turn in his present relationship with Muriel. His words stoke Muriel's self-confidence. Previously, she had shuttled back and forth concerning how much free time she had. Now she relaxes and declares, “I've got plenty of time” (554). She completes the job of getting drunk. She admits her own marriage is a mess. She literally not once, but twice throws her arms around Jesse. And she insists he tell her some Hollywood gossip.

Sensing “victory,” Jesse states what truly does express the sad—vain—hope both Muriel and he have. He says, “The world can change for one hour” (558).

Thus, both Muriel's daydream and Jesse's “come true.” She is made love to by a Hollywood Celebrity. He makes love to an Innocent Woman. Muriel does not want to see, beneath the celebrity, a pathetically insecure, egotistical human being interested only in reasserting his masculinity by sleeping with a middle-aged groupie. Jesse ignores the fact Muriel has become a frustrated, calculating, hard-drinking housewife. On this day both Jesse and Muriel fornicate a fantasy. Consequently, they do not change their drab lives one iota.

Thematically, this one-acter ties in with the other two segments of Plaza Suite and with other writings by Simon. As Edythe M. McGovern observed concerning Jesse, Sam Nash, and Roy Hubley, the main male character in the third one-acter, “There is an interesting commonality among the three principal male characters. … Each man has achieved the visible trappings of success as our middle-class world views that phenomenon. Each has reached the forty to fifty age bracket and somehow discovered that ‘winning the goal’ does not necessarily bring the satisfactions associated with that feat.”⁹ Jesse and Muriel also prove a point Simon dramatizes through the characters in Last of the Red-Hot Lovers, through Faye Medwick and Leo Schneider in Chapter Two, and through the Fran Kubelik/Jeff Sheldrake relationship in Promises, Promises—namely, that a relationship founded on sex without love is an emotionally bankrupt relationship.

“VISITOR FROM FOREST HILLS”

The third one-act play is much lighter fare. In “Visitor from Forest Hills” a prospective bride, Mimsey, locks herself in the suite's bathroom minutes before she is to be married. Unable to entice Mimsey out of the bathroom, Norma, her mother, phones her husband, Roy, downstairs. As soon as he arrives on the scene, he, too, attempts to convince Mimsey to unlock the bathroom door. He also attempts to break the door down and to climb in through the bathroom window. Finally, when her parents converse with her more calmly, Mimsey tells them what is bothering her. Still, she does not come out of the bathroom until her fiancé comes to speak to her.

Here Simon presents in semifarcical fashion the problems of communication and of making a serious commitment to another person when one is intensely aware of the dangers involved. The first problem dominates. When Norma phones downstairs, her future son-in-law's father is the first one to speak with her, and she tells him everything is going along beautifully; the instant her husband gets on the phone her suppressed desperation explodes in words. Yet it is only when Roy enters the suite that she tells him exactly what the problem is. For a minute, Roy does not believe what Norma tells him; then he pigheadedly decides that Norma must have caused the problem by saying the wrong thing to Mimsey.

The problem of communicating is even more effectively dramatized when, before Roy arrives, Norma tells Mimsey, “I know what you're going through now, sweetheart, you're just nervous.” Failing to gain an immediate response from Mimsey, Norma shouts, “Mimsey, if you don't care about your life, think about mine. Your father'll kill me” (561). What becomes increasingly clear is that, in large part, Mimsey refuses to come out of the bathroom because her parents fail to use the right approach with her. Norma should have continued concentrating on what Mimsey was thinking and feeling on her wedding day. Instead, Norma selfishly switched her concern to herself—to her fear about what Roy would say to her when he discovered what Mimsey had done.

Norma's selfishness is more than matched by her husband's. As soon as he enters the suite he says, “Why are you standing here? There are sixty-eight people down there drinking my liquor” (562). Roy's first words to Mimsey are, “This is your father. I want you and your four-hundred-dollar wedding dress out of there in five seconds!” (564). He asks Mimsey nothing; nor does he offer to discuss the situation. He simply issues a command stressing what preoccupies him most—the amount of money that the wedding is costing him.

Both Norma and Roy proceed to pay dearly for their almost continuous self-absorption. Norma rips her stockings while trying to peek through the bathroom-door keyhole. Later, pounding on the door, she breaks her diamond ring. Roy almost breaks his arm when he rams his shoulder into the door. His coat is ripped as he attempts to climb into the bathroom via the window.

Only when Norma begins to concentrate on how Mimsey feels do the parents make any progress. At one point, she exclaims to Roy, “Is that all you care about? What it's costing you? Aren't you concerned about your daughter's happiness?” (565). Later, in a moment of exhaustion, Norma says to Roy, “I'll tell you who can get into that bathroom. Someone with love and understanding. Someone who cares about that poor kid who's going through some terrible decision now and needs help. Help that only you can give her and that I can give her” (577). Momentarily humbled by this insight, Roy for the first time tries seriously to communicate with his daughter. Soon Mimsey talks quietly with him in the bathroom, after which Roy phones the bridegroom, Borden, and asks him to come up. Roy then explains to Norma that their daughter is afraid that Borden and she will become exactly like her parents, whose marriage, filled with incessant bickering, the audience has just seen on display.

When Borden arrives, Roy says, “It seems you're the only one who can communicate with her.” Borden strides to the bathroom door and says, “Mimsey? … This is Borden. … Cool it!” (581). With these few comically cryptic words—and the strength and reassurance offered in his tone and manner—Borden has communicated with Mimsey. Mimsey comes out of the bathroom. Her parents, who have exchanged thousands of words with each other, but who have rarely communicated love for one another, are left bewildered. So, they once again do what they have always done: they turn on each other. Roy says, “What kind of a person is that to let your daughter marry?” Norma snaps back, “Roy, don't aggravate me. I'm warning you” (582).

Despite the faint scent of sadness that permeates the atmosphere of all three segments of Plaza Suite, especially the first two, many critics regarded Simon's latest comedy as no different from all his previous work. Or they considered it retrogressive. Walter Kerr was more perceptive. He wrote that “a shadow of substance has become the base for the joke” in Simon's comedies. Kerr went on to point out that Americans tend to disbelieve that a comedy can contain any serious point. He stated, “One of the crazy mistakes we make in the contemporary theater is that in supposing that if something is serious at all it must be thoroughly, thumpingly serious.” Kerr concluded: “There are small truths … truths of a size that can be accommodated in—and almost cheerfully covered over by—a quip.”¹⁰ Amid the laughter it evokes, Plaza Suite offers incisive character delineations that dramatize several insights into human experience. To perceive these insights, however, and to perceive the high quality of Simon's finest creative achievements, one must accept the possibility that a writer can simultaneously make people laugh and offer them valuable insights.

LAST OF THE RED-HOT LOVERS

Although Last of the Red-Hot Lovers, like Plaza Suite, is a mixture of character delineation, humor, and observations about contemporary life, there are important differences in the two plays. While all three segments of Plaza Suite are soundly constructed, the second act of Last of the Red-Hot Lovers is flawed. On the other hand, in the later play Simon scrutinizes various attitudes toward the human experience more intently and directly than he ever ventured to do before.

Plaza Suite featured three couples occupying the same rooms over a period of approximately six months. Last of the Red-Hot Lovers spotlights one man, Barney Cashman, and the three women he directs, in turn, to his mother's apartment during the course of ten months' time. The first woman to join Barney in the apartment is Elaine Navazio, who frequented the restaurant he owns. Barney, aware of the sexual revolution going on throughout the country, wants one romantic extramarital experience before he moves toward old age. Elaine simply wants sex. In his attempt to make the encounter more than a merely sexual one, Barney keeps talking and talking until Elaine becomes irritated and walks out.

Although Barney vows never again to try to set up an extramarital sexual tryst, he forsakes his vow nine months later. Accidentally meeting Bobbi Michele in the park one afternoon, he lends her money so she can hire an accompanist for her theater audition. The next day, she comes to his mother's apartment, supposedly in order to pay him back. She sees, though, that Barney will not pressure her either for the money or for sexual favors in lieu of the money. She also perceives that her descriptions of her “far out” life fascinate him; so she makes herself comfortable, talks at great length, and finally badgers Barney into smoking some marijuana with her before she leaves.

Within a month, Barney arranges a rendezvous with Jeanette Fisher. Jeanette and her husband, Mel, are good friends of Barney and his wife, Thelma. Barney is much more aggressive than he was on the two previous occasions. Jeanette, however, brooding about Mel's having an affair with another woman, is too depressed to follow through on her previous impulse to have sex with Barney. Instead, she leads Barney into a debate about whether there are any decent people in the world. Barney ultimately convinces her there are. Feeling less melancholy, Jeanette leaves. Barney phones his wife, Thelma, and tries to coax her into coming to the apartment for sex.

Barney, like the three husbands in Plaza Suite, is undergoing a middle-age crisis. Barney's crisis, however, is not caused by a desire to be young again, or by the need to prove his sexual prowess and rebuild his self-confidence, or by a daughter who bewilders him. Barney has become intensely aware of his own mortality. Realizing that he has settled into a bland life-style, and that other people's lives are freer and more exciting, Barney wants more out of his life.

When Elaine Navazio responds to his overtures while in his restaurant, Barney gives her the address of his mother's apartment and hurries there to wait for her. The setting symbolizes part of Barney's inner conflict. The building is new, but the furniture is old, “from another generation.”¹¹ Barney and his values are from another, more conservative generation; but now, like the younger generation, he wants to “swing”—at least a little. His conflicting desires are underscored very quickly in the opening scene. Barney tells Elaine that she looks like someone who should be named Irene. She looks in the mirror and remarks, “No, I look like an Elaine Navazio” (587). Barney wants to see Elaine as an “Irene”—see her within a romantic context. Elaine sticks to reality. Thus, long before Barney articulates the point aloud, it is evident that he wants sex, but that he wants it to be part of a romantic interlude. Elaine wants a brief, intense sexual coupling.

Elaine relishes living on a sensuous level. She wants cigarettes, which she forgot to bring, and many refills of her liquor glass. She speaks straightforwardly and specifically of Barney's physically attractive features. She tells Barney that she gets intense cravings to “eat, to touch, to smell, to see, to do,” and that for her a “sensual, physical pleasure” can only “be satisfied at that particular moment” (594—95). By no coincidence, then, she is the one who keeps bringing the conversation back to the question of when are they going to have sex.

Barney is shocked and dismayed by her directness and her starkly limited desires. While insisting he is not a prude, he repeatedly stresses that he does not want “just” a sexual encounter. He describes his intentions as “of a romantic nature” (598). In defense of choosing his mother's unexotic apartment for their meeting, he says, “I thought a motel was a little sordid” (599). When Elaine complains about Barney's incessant talking, he explains, “I just thought you might be interested in knowing a little bit more about me” (599). Goaded by her jibes, he says, “I find it disturbing, and a little sad, that your attitude towards people is so detached” (601). In sum, he cannot, after all, be like the young swingers he has heard about who have sex, plain and straight, with total strangers.

Nervous and upset, he ultimately succeeds in “humanizing” his encounter with Elaine even more than he wanted to. As Jesse Kiplinger did with Muriel Tate, Barney reveals more about himself and his problems than he originally intended to do. He tells Elaine that other than with his wife, he has had only one sexual experience in his whole life: one night when he was young his brother took him to a middle-aged whore in New Jersey. He goes on to say that although he is for all practical purposes a success in life, he feels he has missed out on many things. What aroused this feeling in him was his increasing awareness of death—that “for the first time in my life I think about dying” (611). He became unhappy that he could be aptly described in one word: “nice.” He asked himself, “Shouldn't there be something else besides opening the restaurant eleven o'clock every morning?” (611). So, he started daydreaming about having one extramarital experience, “an experience so rewarding and fulfilling that it would last me the rest of my life” (612).

Seeking to make his daydream come true, Barney gets far more than he bargained for, just as Chuck did when he pursued his dream girl, Fran, in Promises, Promises. For one thing, Elaine tells him, “If you want undying love and romance, take a guitar and go to Spain” (608). She also informs him that the whore he slept with might well have been her mother. When he preaches to her and inquires about her marriage, she lashes out, “I didn't come up here to get reformed,” and tells him to “leave my sex life alone” (600).

Elaine does not want to analyze her situation, for she does not have any hope of improving her lot in life. She simply wants a moment of unthinking sensuous pleasure. She states, “I happen to like the pure physical act of making love. It warms me, it stimulates me and it makes me feel like a woman” (609). In other words, while Jesse Kiplinger and Muriel Tate kid themselves into believing that “the world can change for one hour,” Elaine entertains no such illusion. She believes nothing will change the basically bleak human condition.

By the time the third-act curtain falls, the play reveals that in Simon's opinion Elaine's outlook is excessively grim. Thus, when, at his most sentimental, Barney describes Elaine as “sad and pitiful” (608), his description is not without validity. Yet Elaine, stung by this description, touches on the truth, too. She retorts that Barney is the pitiful one—and so much of a hypocrite that he should be in no hurry to pass judgment on others. She points out to him that as much as he is presently concerned about “poor” Elaine, once their afternoon together ends he will pray fervently that she never enters his restaurant again. She declares, “I don't know your problems and I don't care. … No one really cares about anything or anyone in this world except himself.” She concludes that the only sensible guideline is: “If you can't taste it, touch it or smell it, forget it!” (609).

Timidly exploring the world at large, Barney has met someone living in a state of resigned, yet intense desperation that minimizes—at least temporarily—his middle-aged awareness that he will eventually die. In fact, Elaine is in far worse physical shape than Barney is. She repeatedly is racked by coughing fits so severe she is forced to hold onto furniture in order to keep from collapsing. Near the end of their rendezvous, Elaine tells Barney that “no one gives a good crap about you dying because a lot of people discovered it ahead of you. We're all dying, Mr. Cashman” (612).

Elaine's attack on Barney's musings about the human condition articulates a view of reality unmatched in fierceness by any other character's philosophy of life in any Simon play to date. It is a far tougher point of view, for instance, than either Fran's or Sheldrake's in Promises, Promises. It is so powerful that Barney will only begin to try fumblingly to undercut Elaine's beliefs ten months later—in Act Three—when he arranges to meet Jeanette in the apartment. A major flaw in Act Two is that it barely touches on the challenge Elaine's philosophy of life presented to Barney.

Nine months after his talk with Elaine, Barney again ventures beyond the world he knows best. Having helped Bobbi Michele out financially, he hopes his rendezvous with her will culminate in sex. But Bobbi comes at Barney from too many directions for him to steer her where he wants to go. It is not really even a matter of Bobbi defeating him in a battle of wills, for no conflict takes place. Barney almost immediately bogs down in merely trying to figure Bobbi out. Eventually, he gives up the effort. He is reduced to being a fascinated listener whom she pressures into operating on her terms. What dilutes dramatic interest still further is that, like Barney, the audience has no way of figuring Bobbi out. Various interpretations of Bobbi's character are suggested via her chatter early on. Unfortunately the rest of the scene merely keeps circling back to those same possible interpretations. It is no wonder that during the tryout period Simon worked more on this middle act than on the other two.

One of the few things that can be said about Bobbi with confidence is that she does not have a firm grip on reality. Not long after she arrives at the apartment, she says, “I love this neighborhood. … I once had a girl friend who lived on this block. Forty-seventh between First and York.” Barney has to correct her: “This is Thirty-seventh” (615). She also tells Barney he is shorter than he looked the day before, and that she remembered him as having a moustache.

At times she appears to be one of life's helpless victims. Barney, for instance, feels sorry for Bobbi while she tells him a man in the airplane seat next to hers pawed her during a recent flight. Barney is startled to learn soon afterward that she gave her “assailant” her phone number. She complains about receiving obscene phone calls; but then it turns out that, instead of hanging up, she listens to the obscenities for fifteen minutes at a clip. She is sometimes equally misleading when describing less bizarre episodes in her life. Speaking about her audition the day before, she tells Barney that David Merrick thought she was fabulous. Pressed by Barney about this reference to Merrick, she backs off, claiming only that someone with a moustache sitting out front praised her. She adds that she would have gotten the part, but the producers wanted a black girl. Yet when Barney later mentions she was turned down at the audition, she snaps, “I didn't say they turned me down. I said they took the black girl” (631).

Bobbi's angry outburst points to another facet of her personality. She undergoes sudden shifts of mood. When a roommate is slow to answer Bobbi's phonecall, Bobbi stops her blithe chatter and remarks coldly, “She hears the phone. She's just a lazy bitch” (620). Nor is she always as naive as she would like Barney to believe. More than a little paranoiac, she laments how cruel people have been to her, including the men with whom she has supposedly had affairs. Then she shrewdly comments, “Married men are rarely vicious. They're too guilty” (624). Although she appears not to listen to what Barney says, he mumbles something about smoking marijuana with her sometime, and later she reminds him of his promise and forces him to light up.

The only mild suspense in this scene resides in the question: what will Bobbi say next? But the audience's curiosity concerning the degree of truth in Bobbi's stories is stymied by there being no objective means of comparing her statements with the reality of her situation. All one can safely say is that while such characters as the “lovers” Jesse and Muriel tried to live an illusion, Bobbi's problem is much worse. She has no more than a tenuous hold on reality.

Still, some of the dialogue near the end of Act Two is important thematically to the play as a whole. Bobbi reassures Barney—and herself—that it is only a matter of time before others recognize her genuine talent as a performer. Then, in another shift of mood, she paranoiacally insists, “People don't want to see you make good … they're all jealous … they're all rotten … they're all vicious” (635). This declaration, as Edythe M. McGovern has pointed out, somewhat parallels Elaine Navazio's outlook on life.¹² Thus, Bobbi's statement reminds the audience that the challenge to refute this outlook has still not been met.

Bitter because she was turned down at the audition, Bobbi speaks of gaining revenge on the world by writing a book telling of all her encounters with men. Barney is instantly nervous. He says, “I'm sure once in a while you must have met some nice men” (629). She calms him down by reassuring him that she will not mention someone as sensitive as him in her book. Significantly, Barney no longer sees his being a “nice” person in a totally negative light.

In Act Two, while high on marijuana, Barney muses, “So many things I wanted to do … but I'll never do 'em,” and adds, “Trapped … we're all trapped” (635). Yet, less than a month later, he makes one last attempt to wriggle out of the “trap” he is in and find an extramarital sexual moment of bliss. Responding to remarks his friend Jeanette makes at a social gathering, Barney arranges a rendezvous with her. Like Elaine and Bobbi, Jeanette has a grim view of life. Jeanette, however, is markedly different from the other two women. She does not try to suppress or evade her darker moods. On the contrary, she wallows in depression. While Elaine escapes into sensual pleasure and Bobbi into fantasy and paranoia, Jeanette broods about the human condition.

Typically, Simon wastes little time setting things into motion. Moments after she enters the apartment, Jeanette begins to sob. As soon as she stops sobbing, she says, “Why am I here, Barney?” (637). The range of Jeanette's probing will not prove very wide. She will make no serious references to religious creeds, politics, or philosophical tenets. Nonetheless, she will, in her tense, fretful way, ask fundamental questions.

Employing a realistic and comic framework, Simon shows Jeanette and Barney stumbling toward these questions. Jeanette does say early on that she thinks Barney is “basically a good person” (638)—an important point they will return to; but the comment is made amid a series of remarks that deflate Barney, for Jeanette is busy stressing how physically unattractive she finds Barney. Barney at this time is totally uninterested in fundamental questions. The defeats he suffered in his previous extramarital encounters have honed his sexual frustrations to a keen edge. He is now in almost the exact frame of mind that Elaine was in ten months earlier. He does not want chitchat. He wants sex.

Ironically, Barney has waited too long and has picked the wrong partner for his current mood. Jeanette is as unsensuous a person as Elaine was sensuous. Elaine craved certain foods; Jeanette states, “I can not taste food” (643). Jeanette also tells Barney, “I don't particularly enjoy sex” (639). Embodying a somber moral awareness and a strong sense of guilt, she is appalled by the same contemporary promiscuity that so intrigues Barney. Barney tries to ply Jeanette with drinks, but she doggedly states, “You're not going to have a good time with me” (642).

Barney wanted to humanize his relationship with Elaine by finding out something about her. With Jeanette, Barney keeps trying to dodge her attempts to instigate a meaningful conversation. Jeanette asks him if her husband, Mel, has talked to Barney about her. Barney brushes aside the very possibility. He does the same thing when Jeanette inquires whether Mel ever spoke to him about Mel's affair with another woman. She asks him if he feels guilty about meeting her in the apartment. Exasperated, Barney finally says to Jeanette, “Why probe deeply into everything?” (641).

Barney's success at avoiding Jeanette's attempts to draw him into a serious conversation ends when Jeanette asks him if he thinks death is terrible. This question snags him. For it was his intensified awareness of death that nurtured his desire for an affair. He replies that he does think death is terrible. Jeanette immediately follows up with another question, “You mean you enjoy your life?” Barney, all seriousness now, responds, “I love living. I have some problems with my life, but living is the best thing they've come up with so far” (644).

Because Jeanette sincerely wants to learn some affirmative reasons why she should go on living, she asks Barney how much of life he actually enjoys. Pressed for a precise answer, he says, “Fifty-one, fifty-two percent” (645). Jeanette then asks him if he thinks there are many decent people in the world, and Barney resumes trying to sidestep Jeanette's series of questions. When she challenges him to name three decent people, however, he—hoping to wrap the whole matter up and get on with the sex—allows himself to accept the challenge. Barney cites his wife, Thelma, as one of the three.

Jeanette is reluctant to put Thelma on her list of three immediately, and now, thoroughly exasperated, Barney begins to shuttle back and forth in mood. He, on the one hand, again wants to blot out the whole conversation by focusing strictly on sex. He becomes increasingly sexually aggressive—almost threatening. On the other hand, he is gnawed at by the still unresolved question of what should be the final judgment of human beings. At one point, he claims, “We're not indecent, we're not unloving. We're human” (650). Later, sexually impatient, he tells Jeanette, “All right, we're all no good” (652).

The climax of the play, the climax that Simon has been moving toward—albeit not all that steadily—since Act One occurs when Jeanette, genuinely frightened by Barney's sexual advances, begs him to stop. She blurts out, “I know you're not like this,” and goes on to say, “You're quiet. You're intelligent.” Then she exclaims, “You're decent! You are, Barney!” (654-55). These statements stop Barney in his tracks. In Act One, a comment by Elaine made Barney realize he unconsciously and fruitlessly kept trying to rid his hands of the smell of the fish he prepared for the customers in his restaurant. Jeanette's comments make him equally aware that—as he said to Bobbi—“We're all trapped.” Just as he can never rid his hands of the smell of fish, he can never escape from the trap of his basic nature. Barney gains the same humbling but helpful self-knowledge that all four characters in Barefoot in the Park and Fran in Promises, Promises gained—and that Oscar and Felix in The Odd Couple never gained. Barney finally accepts that he will never be a part of the new sexual revolution, for he is precisely the type of man he told Elaine he was—a nice guy.

Abandoning his sexual scheme, Barney gets Jeanette to admit that Thelma is gentle, loving, and decent. He makes Jeanette see that, however many other kinds of people there are in the world, a significant number of people are decent, even though these people—because they are human—are imperfect. Paradoxically, thanks to Barney and to her own insistence on confronting her problems, although Jeanette originally wallowed in melancholy, she leaves the apartment much less imprisoned by depression than Elaine and Bobbi.

Despite all the plays and movie scripts he wrote after Last of the Red-Hot Lovers, Simon thus far in his career has never come any closer to stating directly his fundamental opinion of the human experience than he does in this play. This opinion cannot be considered wildly optimistic. He makes no mention of a loving God. He does not posit a heaven; rather, death is inevitable and final. He does not deny that much of our daily world is cold and indifferent to us, and is permeated by evil and insanity. Weighing the good and the bad in life, Simon sees the scale tipping ever so slightly toward the good. What tips the scale is that some people, such as Barney, but not Elaine, try to comfort others as well as to find comfort for themselves.

Notes

1. Linderman, “Playboy Interview,” p. 74.

2. All page references are to The Odd Couple in The Comedy of Neil Simon, pp. 220-21.

3. Simon, “Notes from the Playwright,” pp. 3-4.

4. Walter Kerr, “What Simon Says,” New York Times Magazine, 22 March 1970, p. 14.

5. Howard Taubman, review of The Odd Couple, New York Times, 11 March 1965, p. 36.

6. Simon, “Notes from the Playwright,” p. 3.

7. Zimmerman, “Neil Simon,” pp. 52, 55.

8. All page references are to Plaza Suite in The Comedy of Neil Simon, p. 497.

9. McGovern, Neil Simon, p. 58.

10. Walter Kerr, “Simon's Funny—Don't Laugh,” New York Times, 25 February 1968, Section 2, p. 5.

11. All page references are to Last of the Red-Hot Lovers in The Comedy of Neil Simon, p. 585.

12. McGovern, Neil Simon, p. 77.

The Odd Couple

Plaza Suite

Last of the Red Hot Lovers