A Playwright in the Spotlight of Memory

In these days, when “a play on Broadway is something an audience goes to on the night the musicians forgot to show up,” there is one boulevardier who refuses to turn in his East Coast passport and pledge his full allegiance to Hollywood. Although Neil Simon has written a gazillion movies, he’s written a gazillion-and-one plays (a few of them with musicians), including “The Odd Couple,” “The Goodbye Girl” and “Lost in Yonkers,” earning himself two Broadway badges of honor: a Pulitzer Prize and a theater bearing his name. With “The Play Goes On,” Simon adds a second memoir to his oeuvre.

And yet, what need does a writer like Simon, who pours so much of his own life into his work, have for a memoir? The curtain rises on the untimely death of Simon’s wife, Joan, and his lightning courtship of the young Marsha Mason in uncanny imitation of Simon’s play “Chapter Two.” As the action continues, “The Play Goes On” reads more and more like Cliffs Notes to Simon’s own hit plays and movies.

Sprinkled throughout these notes are a few good anecdotes--George Burns on the mating possibilities of his sister Trixie and Harvey Keitel, the firing of Robert de Niro from “The Goodbye Girl,” the audition of Irene Worth for “Lost in Yonkers”--with Simon, gracious writer that he is, giving the best lines to his actors. There are a few theatrical saws, just sharp enough to be true. “The fate of a show,” Simon writes, following the Broadway failure of the musical version of “The Goodbye Girl,” “is not decided by who stars in it or by who’s directing or who’s writing it. More often than not, a show that is questionable is destined to fail on the day that someone who has the power to make it happen says, ‘Hey! I think this would make a great show. Let’s do it.’ ”

Simon also expresses a modicum of literary angst that he is not seated in the front row of contemporary playwrights alongside the Pinters and the Stoppards. “Those writers who go to the deepest and darkest of agonies are the ones who have lived there as well: O’Neill, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Beckett. The rest of us are not so brave, or perhaps not so damaged and broken, so we do not soar.” He is repeating, of course, the refrain of decades of theatrical critics who have relegated Simon to the unfashionable mezzanine of middlebrow theater.

Yet the audiences have ignored the critics and come and come again, partially because, as Walter Kerr once said, Simon “has learned not to listen.” Or perhaps Simon has learned only to listen to the obsessive whir of his typewriter and the unabashed beating of his heart.

So it is little surprise that the most touching, most character-revealing memory in the memoir is of the valentine Simon wrote for his daughter Nancy. Only 10 years old at the time of her mother’s death, Nancy often told her father how much she wished she could have had the extra years her elder sister had to talk with her mother, to introduce her husband, her daughter. In the play “Jake’s Women,” Simon gives her the chance. Jake, a stand-in for Simon, conjures up his dead wife in his imagination with such force that even his daughter can see and talk with her. “The magic that writing plays gives you,” Simon writes, “is the ability to make anyone you want to appear on a stage for all to see--and then to disappear just as quickly.”

Not a profound comment, perhaps, and Simon may not be the philosopher, the husband or the playwright of the century. But at the curtain, we can’t help but give a standing “O” to one heck of a father and an A-Number-One mensch.