Neil Simon Engulfed by New ‘Rumors’

Neil Simon has a cold, so he’s eating onion soup.

Does he mind talking while he eats?

No. “It takes my mind off the soup.”

Actually, it takes his mind off plenty of things. His new play, “Rumors,” opens at the Old Globe Theatre here on Thursday. He’s been working almost around the clock through four weeks of rehearsals, and he is out of energy and ideas both. Better he should do an interview.

Forget the 22 plays that he’s had produced on Broadway--23 if you include his “female” version of “The Odd Couple”--and the 19 movies. Forget the critical acclaim that surrounded his last three plays, the “BB” trilogy of “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” “Biloxi Blues” and “Broadway Bound.” For Simon, it’s always the first time.

At a tribute dinner last week in Los Angeles, as people like Charlton Heston and Lucille Ball took the stage to salute him in front of hundreds of people paying $350 a head to support the Music Center and Center Theatre Group/Ahmanson, what did he say after a quick thank you? He apologized for being “unfocused,” but he had a new play opening in San Diego: “My head is here, my heart is there, and the rewrites are somewhere on the San Diego Freeway.”

Writing the plays is the easy part. “The writing part never amazes me,” says Simon, 61 now. “It’s that I went and did them. I went out of town and tried them out. It’s the rewriting and putting on a show--that’s where all the pressure comes from and what wears you down. “

Simon does not let go. He considers the show’s run here a tryout, and he’s been at rehearsal each day, rewriting each evening. And when his hands stopped rewriting, his head kept going, keeping him awake long into the night. Even after the show opens here next week, there are still several weeks worth of fix-up time before the show opens on Broadway in mid-November.

On Simon’s first day here, he says almost wistfully, he and his longtime producer and friend Manny Azenberg threw down their luggage and played two sets of tennis. Four weeks of rehearsal--and five endings--later, an observer worries whether the ailing playwright will have strength to finish his soup and chicken salad and make it back upstairs to his hotel room for a nap.

“Because he’s so prolific, no one gives him his due for commitment,” Azenberg says.

“He writes plays because he loves to write plays. He loves the process. He loves rehearsals. He loves rewriting. And when he finishes, he goes and writes another one. He loves the doing of it.”

He must. Simon is the primary financial backer of his plays, Azenberg confirms, “and if you think they’re all successes, you’re wrong.” Or as Simon puts it, “You’re putting your head in the noose every time. You’re putting your head on the chopping block every time for the critics to come and take a whack at you.”

That image must be particularly vivid to Simon this time out. Not only is he working in a new city, with unfamiliar audiences, but he’s tossing his very first farce to the wolves.

“Having done the trilogy, ending up with the deepest, most serious one, I just had a need to do a comedy. To do a new form. To try a new style of writing. It was something I never wrote before--a great change of pace from what I’ve been doing recently, and I think unexpected. I chose to write a play for its style rather than its content.”

“Rumors” is set in Sneeden’s Landing, N.Y., about 35 minutes out of Manhattan, where a man and woman celebrating their 10th anniversary have invited four other couples to join them.

“It’s a black-tie affair because it’s a very special anniversary,” says Simon. “It’s very elegant. They’re in a beautiful house and everyone’s in dinner clothes, which I think helps the people seem more ludicrous. There’s something grown-up about them, and they act like children because of this dumb situation they get caught in.”

What dumb situation? Well, farcical situations, Simon says. There’s time pressure. Everything seems a matter of life and death. And in this particular farce, he hints, it all “derives out of rumors and gossip and how it gets distorted because people are so quick to grab onto the rumors and tend to believe the worst.”

Could he be more specific? Is it autobiographical? “Oh, God, no,” answers the man who has many times immortalized the figures of his youth.

“It has no redeeming social value so far as I can tell,” adds Old Globe artistic director Jack O’Brien. Conceding only that yes, there’s a gunshot at some point, Simon says, “don’t ask me what happens. It’s so convoluted, with about 25 things going on, that what happens takes the length of the play to explain.”

“Rumors,” in fact, is not only his hardest play to talk about, says Simon, but it’s the hardest play he’s ever written, more difficult than the entire “BB” trilogy combined. “The play can never let up for a second. The action of the story always has to keep moving, and generally at an almost frenetic pace. Just the geography of it, trying to figure out where the 10 people are in the house, is almost a geometric puzzle. I had to keep going back and reading and seeing where the people were and where I left them.”

The pressure is bad enough when you’re healthy, but this man has a terrible cold. Maybe the flu. “I felt myself squeezing my mind at one point like a tube of toothpaste to get out an idea,” Simon says. “We would have dinner almost every night at the end of rehearsal, to just talk about what we felt about the play and what it needed. I’d sit there, my head clogged with sinus infections, and squeeze, and I’d think of something. I’d stay up that night and write it and the theater would send (someone) over at 11:30 at night to pick up pages and type them up clean for the actors. . . . Doing plays is sometimes an insane thing to do with your life.”

For Old Globe subscribers, it’s been a long wait for this Simon outing. He first talked with O’Brien about a musical called “A Foggy Day,” which the playwright would write using Gershwin songs. The Gershwin idea fizzled--Simon says he’s now totally dropped it--and a while later, Simon offered a play called “Jake’s Women.” But he couldn’t find the right actor so he put that play on a back burner and out came “Rumors.”

Simon has been turning to regional theater to premiere new work for several years now. After launching five plays at the Ahmanson, he turned to Duke University for “Broadway Bound” and says where he opens “has to do with who asks us. One doesn’t go to Boston or New Haven to try out plays anymore. It’s too expensive and they don’t have subscriptions. The places that (work) are the universities and the regional theaters. San Diego has one of the best subscriptions.”

Simon says he feels this play is best served in a theater like the Globe, with its 581 seats, rather than the 2,071-seat Ahmanson, but the playwright has also been very vocal very often about his dismay at facing Los Angeles critics and audiences with what he considered a work-in-progress and they considered a finished work.

“If you open in Los Angeles, the pressure on you to be good right away is too hard. I did it before and people say, ‘If you could do it before, you could do it again.’ But I didn’t want to do it again.”

Should all go according to plan, Simon’s longtime director, Tony-winner Gene Saks, will take the cast and set East to open Nov. 17 on Broadway. If the show is profitable, says Azenberg, the Globe will participate financially on everything from future stage productions to film; the producer says the Ahmanson alone has already received upwards of $1 million in such royalties from Simon plays that premiered there.

Simon plans to leave for a European vacation the day after his Broadway opening: “When I get this tired, I can’t even think of doing any more plays.” Even the plays he didn’t do wore him out: “You put the same energy and intention into those things and suddenly they get aborted and it makes you more tired.”

Personally, too, he talks of traumas. Simon and his third wife, Diane Lander, recently separated. Asked how long they were married, he counts out 20 months on his fingers.

And last fall, his son-in-law, Jeffrey Bishop, husband of his eldest daughter, Ellen, died after being hit by a car. Ellen Simon, now 31, has written a play called “Moonlight and Valentino” about the loss of her husband and how her friends helped her through mourning, which Simon says Azenberg will produce at Duke University in February.

His daughter’s play is “more on my mind right now than any play I would be writing for myself,” says Simon. “I’m positive she has a career as a writer ahead of her.”