SIMON SAYS: LAUGH, DAMMIT!

 

You don't hear much about Neil Simon anymore, and it's not just because he's been dead four years, or wrote his final play 15 years before that. For a guy who seemed to personify Broadway, he seems if not forgotten then ignored.

It can't be because his plays are "old". You can always count on Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams hitting Broadway every few years. Currently, David Mamet's 1975 play American Buffalo is a hot ticket, as is the 416 year-old Macbeth, and that's with dialogue nobody understands. 

Think back to 1966, when there were four Neil Simon plays running simultaneously in New York. Forty years later, the revivals of two of them -- The Odd Couple and Barefoot in the Park -- barely outlasted their initial ticket sales before closing. The former starred Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, who had just killed in The Producers a year earlier, which tells you something.

Perhaps that's why it took this long for someone to bring back Plaza Suite with Sarah Jessica Parker and her husband Matthew Broderick (hey, him again!). After a two-year COVID delay, we saw it over the weekend. 

Now, this won't be a review of Plaza Suite. You can go online for any number of those, most of which are mixed at best, with a couple of outright pans to even things out. The New York Times tut-tutted its non-woke humor (which is perhaps why The Taming of the Shrew isn't expected any time soon). Others noted its dated references, Plaza Suite having been written in 1968. 

As I watched Plaza Suite from my vertigo-inducing balcony seat, I thought back 40 years, My then-roommate had a hard copy of the Neil Simon musical They're Playing Our Song lying around. Having never seen any of Simon's work on stage, I thought reading it would at least give me a taste of the experience.

By the time I got to the end of Act II, I was marveling at how easy Simon made comedic playwrighting seem to be. Every line of dialogue was a joke. Over and over again I thought, I wish I could write something half as good as this. 

And yet at the same time another thought was running through my head: Enough with the jokes! You're funny, I get it! Jealousy? Partly, of course. But it was also exhaustion. Just stop for five minutes! And yet when Simon stopped for five minutes in Act I of Plaza Suite, it felt like nothing deeper than a "very special episode" of a sitcom. 

Perhaps the problem. Having started writing comedy for TV in the 1950s, Simon's plays today resemble very long sitcoms at $250 for orchestra seats.

I'm not saying it's impossible to write a successful non-stop comedy. Noises Off is likely the funniest play I'll ever see. It's a farce, like Act III of Plaza Suite -- not coincidentally, the best part of the show, and the only part that doesn't rely on big names to pull it off. But if Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick can't make a success out of The Odd Couple these days, then nobody can.

Most of the people at Plaza Suite were our age and older. Any younger folks were Sex and the City fans, and were there solely for Sarah Jessica Parker. They certainly weren't there for the moment in Act I when her character responds to her husband catting around with his secretary with a shrug.

It could very well be, then, that the audiences for Neil Simon plays are dying off. The critics who waxed rhapsodic about him in his prime are certainly long gone. 

Speaking of critics, Brooks Atkinson, who retired from the New York Times in 1960, is today known only for a theater named after him.  By 2066, it's possible Neil Simon, the most popular playwright of his time, will suffer the same fate. Meanwhile, Macbeth will be pushing 500 years old and charging $2,500 for orchestra seats in a theater named after Nathan Lane, and nobody will remember him, either. 

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