NEIL SIMON TODAY

When I was in my teens and twenties, I wondered if the day would ever come in which the plays of Neil Simon would be "dated."  Sadly, that day has arrived.  In fact, it came around the year 2000.  This is not to say that his plays are not good or even great.  They simply have become "period pieces."  Very few of them could be produced commercially today--his masterpiece, The Odd Couple, and perhaps The Sunshine Boys being the exceptions.  (Even they have become period pieces.)  It's simply that the world has changed too much.  Simon's plays were appreciated, despite their ethnicity, because we had a common culture that embraced that ethnicity.  That ethnicity has long since disappeared, as has that common culture.

The tourist Broadway audiences cannot relate to them, as was discovered a few short years ago, when an attempted revival of one of his plays had to close almost as soon as it opened on Broadway; there were simply not enough advance sales.

The critics, by and large, did not appreciate Simon's plays when they were produced on Broadway in the 1960s, '70s, and beyond.  This is probably because they were not "socially relevant"--i.e., they did not tackle social problems such as war, racism, poverty, etc.  (Some critics said that he was simply a "gag writer" as opposed to a playwright, a charge I felt and still feel was largely unwarranted.)  They were about types of people--their faults, peculiarities, and so forth.  They were character studies set against certain backgrounds--largely ethnic backgrounds that were nonetheless acceptable to a very wide audience.  This "world of Neil Simon" has long passed, and I am saddened by it.

Part of Simon's trouble is the fact that straight plays--whether dramas or comedies--cannot sustain on Broadway.  (I remember when a play entitled Top Dog, Under Dog, won the Pulitzer Prize and then opened--for a limited run--on Broadway.  That was around 2002.)  Arthur Miller spent the last ten years of his life making speeches complaining that the professional playwright had disappeared.  I had and have no argument to make against him.

Anyway, for what it's worth, we still love Neil Simon.
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