Neil Simon

Playwright behind such US classics as The Odd Couple and Barefoot in the Park

Neil Simon, playwright. Born: 4 July 1927 in New York City, United States. Died: 26 August 2018 in Newyork, aged 91.

Neil Simon, the playwright whose name was synonymous with Broadway comedy and commercial success in the theatre for decades, and who helped redefine popular American humour with an emphasis on the frictions of urban living and the agonising conflicts of family intimacy, has died. The cause was complications of pneumonia.

Early in his career, Simon wrote for television greats, including Phil Silvers and Sid Caesar. Later he wrote for films, too. But it was as a playwright that he earned his lasting fame, with a long series of expertly tooled laugh machines that kept his name on Broadway marquees virtually non-stop throughout the late 1960s and 70s.

Beginning with the breakthrough hits Barefoot in the Park (1963) and The Odd Couple(1965)andcontinuingwith popular successes like Plaza Suite (1968), The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1971) and The Sunshine Boys (1974), Simon ruled Broadway.

From 1965 to 1980, his plays and musicals racked up more than 9,000 performances, a record. In 1966 alone, he had four Broadway shows running simultaneously. He also owned a Broadway theatre for a spell in the 1960s, the Eugene O’neill, and in 1983 had a different Broadway theatre named after him, a rare accolade for a living playwright.

For all their popularity with audiences, Simon’s great successes in the first years of his fame rarely earned wide critical acclaim, and Broadway revivals of The Odd Couple in 2005 and Barefoot in the Park in 2006 did little to change the general view that his early work was most notable for its surefire conceits and snappy punchlines. Critic Clive Barnes once wrote:“neil Simon is destined to remain rich, successful and underrated”.

But Simon gained a firmer purchase on critical respect in the 1980s with his darkerhued semi-autobiographical trilogy, Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), Biloxi Blues (1985) and Broadway Bound (1986). These comedy-dramas were admired for the way they explored the tangle of love, anger and desperation that bound together – and drove apart – a Jewish working-class family, as viewed from the perspective of the youngest son, a restless wisecracker with an eye on showbiz fame.

“The writer at last begins to examine himself honestly, without compromises”, critic Frank Rich wrote of Biloxi Blues in the New York Times, “and the result is his most persuasively serious effort to date – not to mention his funniest play since the golden age of his first decade.”

In 1991, Simon won a Tony Award, as well as the ultimate US playwriting award, the Pulitzer Prize, for Lost in Yonkers, another autobiographical comedy. It was his last major success on Broadway.

Simon and Woody Allen, who both worked in the 1950s writing for Caesar, were probably equally significant in shaping the currents of American comedy in the 1960s and 70s, although their styles, their favoured mediums and the critical reception of their work diverged mightily.

Simon was the populist whose accessible, joke-packed plays about the anxieties of everyday characters could tickle funny bones in theatres across the US as well as in 1,200-seat Broadway houses. Allen was the darling of the urban art-house cinema and the critical classes who created comedy from the minutiae of his own angst. But together they helped make the comedy of urban neurosis – distinctly Jewish-inflected – utterly American. Simon’s early plays, often centred on an antagonistic couple of one kind or another wielding cutting one-liners in a New York apartment, helped set the template for the explosion of sitcoms on network TV in the 1970s. A line can be drawn between the taut plot threads of his early comedies – a slob and a tidiness obsessive form an irascible all-male marriage in The Odd Couple, newlyweds bicker in a new apartment in Barefoot in the Park, a laid-off fellow has a meltdown in The Prisoner of Second Avenue – and the character-based comedy of seminal 1990s sitcom Seinfeld.

Agony is at the root of comedy, and for Simon it was the agony of an unhappy Depression-era childhood that inspired much of his finest work. And it was the agony of living in Los Angeles that drove his determination to break free from the grind of cranking out jokes for Jerry Lewis on TV and make his own name. As he wrote in his 1996 autobiography, Rewrites, the comforts of Hollywood living might extend your life span, but the catch was that when you eventually did die, it surely wouldn’t be from laughing.

Born in the Bronx, Marvin Neil Simon was the son of a salesman, Irving Simon, who abandoned the family more than once during his childhood, leaving his mother, May, to take care of Neil and his older brother, Danny. When the family was intact, the mood was darkened by constant battles between the parents.

The tensions of the family, which moved to the Washington Heights district when Simon was five, would find their way into many of his plays, notably the late trilogy but also the early comedies, including his first play, Come Blow Your Horn (1961), about a young man leaving home to join his older brother, a bachelor and ladies’ man. “When an audience laughed, I felt fulfilled”, Simon wrote in Rewrites. “It was a sign of approval, of being accepted. Coming as I did from a childhood where laughter in the house meant security, but was seldom heard as often as a door slamming every time my father took another year’s absence from us, the laughter that came my way in the theatre was nourishment.”

Simon’s screenwriting career included dozens of titles, among them many adaptations of his plays. He also wrote original movies, including, The Goodbye Girl, and most notably The Heartbreak Kid, a black comedy, based on a story by Bruce Jay Friedman, directed by Elaine May and starring Charles Grodin and Cybill Shepherd.

The Goodbye Girl, which co-starred Marsha Mason, received nine Academy Award nominations, including one for Simon’s screenplay. Mason was Simon’s wife at the time. His first wife, Joan, died of cancer in 1973. He met Mason at an audition, and they were married four months later.

Simon, who lived in Manhattan, was married five times. After his divorce from Mason, he married actress Diane Lander in 1987. They divorced a year later but remarried in 1990, then divorced again. Simon married actress Elaine Joyce in 1999. She survives him, along with his daughters Ellen Simon and Nancy Simon from his first marriage and his daughter Bryn Lander Simon from his marriage to Lander.

Looking back, Simon wrote with a still starry-eyed joy of his decision to embark on a playwriting career: “For a man who wants to be his own master, to depend on no one else, to make life conform to his own visions rather than to follow the blueprints of others, playwriting is the perfect occupation. To sit in a room alone for six or seven or 10 hours, sharing the time with characters that you created, is sheer heaven. And if not heaven, it’s at least an escape from hell”. CHARLES ISHERWOOD The Scotsman welcomes obituaries and appreciations from contributors as well as suggestions of possible obituary subjects.

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