Broadway loses one of its most prolific talents
• Playwright Neil Simon, a master of comedy whose laugh-filled hits such as The Odd Couple, Barefoot in the Park and his Brighton Beach trilogy dominated Broadway for decades, has died. He was 91.
Simon died early Sunday of complications from pneumonia at New York Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, said Bill Evans, a longtime friend and spokesman for Shubert Organization theatres.
In the second half of the 20th century, Simon was the American theatre’s most successful and prolific playwright, often chronicling middle class issues and fears. Starting with Come Blow Your Horn in 1961 and continuing into the next century, he rarely stopped working on a new play or musical.
Simon’s stage successes included The Prisoner of Second Avenue, Last of the Red Hot Lovers, The Sunshine Boys, Plaza Suite, Chapter Two, Sweet Charity and Promises, Promises. But there were other plays and musicals, too — more than 30 in all. For seven months in 1967, he had four productions running at the same time on Broadway: Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, Sweet Charity and The StarSpangled Girl.
Simon was the recipient of four Tony Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the Kennedy Center Honours (1995), four Writers Guild of America Awards and an American Comedy Awards Lifetime Achievement honour. In 1983, he had a Broadway theatre named after him, and in 2006 he won the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
The bespectacled, mildlooking Simon was a relentless writer — and rewriter. In the introduction to one of the many anthologies of his plays, he wrote: “I am most alive and most fulfilled sitting alone in a room, hoping that those words forming on the paper in the Smith-Corona will be the first perfect play ever written in a single draft.”
He was a meticulous jokesmith, peppering his plays, especially the early ones, with comic one-liners and humorous situations that critics said sometimes came at the expense of character and believability. But for much of his career, audiences embraced his work, which often focused on middle-class, urban life. Many of the plots were drawn from his own personal experience.
Simon was married five times, twice to the same woman. He leaves his fourth wife, actress Elaine Joyce; two daughters, Ellen and Nancy; three grandchildren; and one great-grandson.