The Prisoner of Second Avenue

by Neil Simon

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Critical Overview

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While some of Neil Simon’s plays are not well received by critics, audiences love just about all of them. The Prisoner of Second Avenue, however, earned some strong reviews like the one from Cliff Glaviano in the Library Journal, who writes, “Simon takes a good look at apartment life, career and role reversals, a nervous breakdown, and the love, torture, care, or inertia that somehow keeps a couple in a relationship for many years.” He praises both the style of this “classic American comedy” that “at points” is “laugh-out-loud funny” and filled with “fast-moving dialog with nonstop Simon quips and jokes” as well as its themes, claiming that “it offers sensitive insight into the human condition.”

In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Philip Brandes criticizes “dramatic ironies so broad you could drive a truck through.” He also finds fault with “those relentless one-liners, capping dialogue that predictably opts for cleverness at the expense of truth,” as when “a Simonized breakdown polishes the rough edges of schizophrenia to more comfortable contours.” Yet he concludes, “while the production has its problems, it works in unexpected ways,” especially in the darkness of its comedy.

Sheridan Morley, in his review for Spectator, finds “a couple of rather uneasy comic turns in a curiously and uncharacteristically clumsy construction,” noting that four of the play’s characters appear only at the end of act 2.

Reviewers disagree over whether the play is dated. Brandes claims that it is, along with Morley who calls it “a time-warped slice of urban history.” Yet Glaviano insists that if the audience can “add a cellular phone or two, . . . it’s life in 2000.”

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Essays and Criticism

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