If you have any awareness of contemporary American theatre, you know Neil Simon. The prolific playwright has chronicled the dreams and disasters of New York City residents in over thirty plays and twenty films, and is one of the most successful playwrights of the twentieth century. Beginning with the debut of his first Broadway play, Come Blow Your Horn in 1961, Simon was an immediate success. He has been nominated for more Tony and Oscar awards than any other writer, and is the only person to ever have four shows running simultaneously on Broadway.
Neil Simon’s beginnings were quite humble. He was born in the Bronx on the 4th of July in 1927 to Irving and Mamie Simon. Several times throughout his childhood, his father abandoned the home, leaving his mother to raise him and his brother alone. During these bouts of single-motherhood, Mamie was forced to send Neil and his brother off to live with nearby relatives. Each time, his father would return, only to desert the family again, until the couple eventually divorced.
His interest in comedy and writing comes directly from his older brother, Danny, who was the only constant in young Simon’s life. Danny – eight years the elder – helped raise his brother while living with family in the Bronx. When Neil was fifteen and living with his brother, then 23, in Queens, the two collaborated on a series of comedy sketches that they sold to a department store for their annual employee performance. After graduating from high school at sixteen, he enrolled at New York University but dropped out to join the Air Force just after World War II had ended. During his deployment, he took classes at the University of Denver and there he began to study comedy writing seriously.
After Simon was discharged from the Air Force, Danny helped him to get a job in the Warner Brothers mailroom, bringing him back to New York where the two began writing together again on the side. Simon quit after two years to join his brother in the pursuit of a full-time writing career. The two worked their way up the ranks of television writers until they were writing for some of the most significant comedy shows of their time – The Jackie Gleason Show, The Phil Silvers Show, and Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar. The duo continued writing together, eventually moving towards theatre. Their first show, Catch a Star!, which was developed out of the many sketches they had written together over the years, was produced in 1955, though Danny alone received the full writing credit.
Simon owes the inspiration for his first solo play, Come Blow Your Horn, to his time spent living and working with his older brother. Come Blow Your Horn opened at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on February 22, 1961 and was a huge hit with audiences. Frank Aston of the New York Theatre Critics’ Review believed it was “in its own way…a small masterpiece by a writer who learned his trade in television.” Howard Taubman of the New York Times referred to it as “a slick, lively, funny comedy,” and the Daily News’ John Chapman noted that “Simon has a knack for writing individual comedy scenes.” While not viewed as a masterpiece by all critics, the play’s popularity with spectators was universal, as acknowledged by Walter Kerr of the New York Herald Tribune, who ended his review by saying “it is imperative that I report a blockbuster response on the part of the customers.” Years later, Simon himself said that the play was “a monumental effort. Today it seems like crude markings in a cave by the first prehistoric chronicler. Still, it was an important step for me. The theatre and I discovered each other.” Come Blow Your Horn closed in October 1962 after 678 performances. His next project to reach Broadway opened only weeks later: Little Me featured music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Carolyn Leigh, and book by Neil Simon, The musical starred Sid Caesar in the role that earned the actor a Tony Award nomination for best actor in a musical. In 1963, he returned to comedic plays with Barefoot in the Park. These were the beginnings of Simon’s long and continuous string of successful plays for the theatre.
Simon’s plays nearly always reflect his personal life and he has often spoken of his inability “to write outside [his] own experience.” Real life again influenced Simon when Danny divorced and moved to the West Coast to live with an agent friend and his wife – who quickly moved out. This anecdote sparked The Odd Couple, which opened in 1965 and won Simon his first Tony award and would go down in his repertoire as one of his most famous plays.
While Simon’s early works were purely comedic – and all his plays are cut with his distinctive sharp wit – he eventually went on to tackle some serious subject matter. He shows his serious side in Chapter Two, written in 1977, which draws on his experience of moving on and finding new love after the death of his first wife. In 1983, Simon penned the semi-autobiographical play, Brighton Beach Memoirs, which won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play. This was the first of a trilogy of plays, followed by Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound, all of which are colored by his personal life.
While many of this works contain biographical elements, especially life in New York City and Jewish American characters, Come Blow Your Horn is considered to be among those that most closely parallel events in his personal life.
Simon’s extensive accomplishments in theatre have perhaps eclipsed the early success of Come Blow Your Horn, resulting in a relatively scare production history despite its initial popularity. It played in London for a short time in 1962, and was then made into a film with a screenplay by Norman Lear and starring Tony Bill and Frank Sinatra in 1963. It has not seen in any well-known production in New York since 1980, when an Off-Broadway revival was mounted by the Jewish Repertory Theatre. Regionally, it was produced by the Mark Two Dinner Theatre in Orlando in 1987, the Stage Door Theatre in Margate, Florida in 2010, and most recently by the American Century Theatre in Washington DC in 2013.
Simon has been generous to Broadway, rolling out hit after hit for decades. Although he continued to write until 2004, his last major success was Lost in Yonkers. Premiered in 1991, Lost in Yonkers earned Simon the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Tony Award for Best Play, and Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play. The play was later turned into a feature film in 1993. In 2012, TACT’s production of Lost in Yonkers earned a Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Revival of a Play.
Neil Simon’s unique brand of comedy and comic drama hits audiences close to home by portraying what he considers the personal wars that everyone deals with on a daily basis. He, like many, prefers to tackle such problems with humor. Now retired, Simon’s prolific career in professional theatre has included four Tony Awards, thirty four stage plays and twenty eight screenplays. With his plays still in high demand, Neil Simon will remain an integral part of American theatre for many years to come.
