SIMON SAYS

At the age of 57, playwright Neil Simon can look back on a string of smash hits that includes Barefoot in the Park, Plaza Suite, Last of the Red Hot Lovers, The Odd Couple, The Sunshine Boys, Chapter Two and the recent Brighton Beach Memoirs, as well as screenplays for movies such as The Goodbye Girl, Seems Like Old Times and Murder by Death. Despite an often troubled personal life that has seen the death of one wife and a much-publicized divorce from another (actress Marsha Mason), Simon has endured to become the undisputed king of the Broadway box office. But he doesn’t rest on his laurels. Last summer, he finished work on a screenplay for The Slugger’s Wife, the story of a baseball star and his romance with a beautiful rock singer. Next month, Simon brings a new version of his comedy classic The Odd Couple to Dallas for its off-Broadway premiere. The saga of Oscar and Felix has undergone some startling changes, however: The new incarnation boasts a largely female cast, starring Rita Moreno and Sally Struthers as the ill-matched roommates. D associate editor Chris Tucker caught up with Simon in a New York hotel – not the Plaza – to ask him about the newest Odd Couple and the career of America’s most successful playwright.

D: Why have you revised The Odd Couple for a female cast?

Simon: That’s a good question, and I’m not sure I have a really good answer for you, except that people have been asking me to do it for 15 years now. Several women, some of them very famous in the business, have come to me and asked if they could take The Odd Couple out on tour. I said it’s not that simple. How are you going to do it-just change the names of the characters? No, it had to be completely changed, even the attitudes. And that took a great deal of work on my part, almost writing a new play, even though the basic play structure would still be there. I had decided not to do it until two women came to me in California and were so insistent about it. They did a reading of the play with a few variations on the theme. I listened, and I was taken with it. It was very funny, but I knew it would require a lot of work. Then my brother [Danny, a screenwriter] got a cast together with Rita Moreno and put on a staged reading for about 50 people. They enjoyed it enormously. When I started working on it, I realized it had to be the old play, but with new concepts and new dialogue. The dialogue of the play is about 80 percent different.

D: Can you tell us about some of the differences?

Simon: I don’t want to quote specific lines. A lot of it has to do with women’s attitudes and changing social tastes. For instance, in the original Odd Couple, the curtain went up and six guys were sitting around smoking. The room was filled with smoke. In 1984, people just don’t smoke as much, so only one woman is smoking. That kind of thing.

D: Are the relationships between the characters roughly the same?

Simon: The Oscar character, who’s now called Olive, is divorced. Florence, the Felix character, has just broken up with her husband. In the original, Oscar had a child and was paying alimony. In the new play, as it often happens in current society, Olive is the breadwinner. She had been married to an actor who doesn’t work very much; she works for one of the networks producing the evening news. It was probably her second marriage and she has no children. Florence has two children 10 or 11 years old. Olive is not as sloppy as Oscar was. The point is to open it up and give women their say about what it’s like to be in this kind of relationship. People living together have problems; it doesn’t have to be just sloppiness as compared with finickiness.

D: You haven’t done anything like this revision before. Is the success of the project particularly important to you?

Simon: No, not really. You want to be accepted every time you go to bat because you believe in it. But I’ll accept whatever happens with the critics and the audiences. If they say this doesn’t work, what’s the point of arguing about it? Right now, I don’t really know how it’s going to work. I’ve saved passages, lines and attitudes from the original, but there are dozens-I’d say hundreds-of new lines. I don’t know how people will perceive the new play. I don’t want to mislead them into thinking they’re not going to see The Odd Couple. It’s still about two people, one sloppy and one neat. They’re still poker players. But the food is different, the furniture, the layout of the apartment. It remains to be seen whether it will be as funny and fresh as the original. My feeling is that it will be, judging from the reactions of the people who have read it and seen the staged readings. There’s so much interest in it. People are saying this could be good, whereas if I had just recast it with men, no matter how good they were, I don’t know how interested people would be.

D: What are your thoughts when you see one of your plays on opening night? Do you study the crowd’s reactions?

Simon: By the time you get to opening night, the verdict was in long ago. The verdict starts the first day you sit around the table and hear the actors read it. Maybe you say “Aha! This is something.” Then it’s for the rest of the world to discover what you’ve got. Then you see it in front of a very small group, maybe just the producers and the technical people who are going to do the lighting. You watch it through their eyes to measure it. So by the time you get to opening night and the critics come, you have a pretty good idea whether this play is going to make it or not. I don’t believe in those miracles where things just turn around and this disaster becomes a hit on opening night, or this great hit becomes a flop. When you’re working with good professional people, you know by the time you get up there if you have something. On preview night in Dallas, I won’t take a single note. I won’t write down a thing. Then the next day, I’ll go over every single line of every page and remember what the reactions were. I’ll try to decide whether the reactions were well-founded. Did something go wrong on stage, or did the audience really just not care about that particular line? You’ve got to be discerning, but you can’t do it all in one night. It takes days, weeks.



D: One of your characters in Chapter Two calls himself “God’s interior decorator.” Is that how you see your comedy, as an attempt to brighten up people’s lives?

Simon: That depends on the play and what I’m writing about. The plays of the last few years have been darker than the early ones. I go back and forth. I’ll do a light comedy, then I’ll do something heavier like Chapter Two or The Gingerbread Lady. The object is not just to entertain, although no matter what you do-even a play with a deep message-you’d better entertain or I don’t think they’re going to listen. But my object is not to whitewash the world and make it a beautiful place. If it’s a romantic comedy, people have to care about this romance. If you’re dealing with deeper, more reflective matters, like in Brighton Beach Memoirs, you have to stir other memories.

D: In The Prisoner of Second Avenue, your character loses his job, has a nervous breakdown and becomes a hermit in his own apartment. Is that your darkest play?

Simon: I don’t consider any play my darkest. I mean, it has dark elements. But I write in a unique form which sometimes confuses critics and audiences-not too much, I hope. I try to take serious subjects and show the humorous side of them, and take humorous aspects of life and show the seriousness of them. It’s the way life is. You can be in a very serious situation in your life and suddenly the telephone rings and someone on the other end is giving you very good news. And the reverse happens: I’m at the happiest point in my life, and suddenly the tables turn and my whole life is turned around. I see no reason why the theater should not reflect what happens in life.

D: That sounds like the end of Prisoner, where Mel is snatched from despair by a gift of $25,000. Is that happy ending believable’’

Simon: I don’t believe in happy endings because I don’t know what an ending is. An ending just means that, for that particular moment, the problem is solved. To say that somebody gets married and then their problems are solved is foolish. You get married and your happiness is beginning, but so are your problems. Happy endings are something tacked onto fairy tales.

D: How much of your work could be called autobiographical, aside from Brighton Beach Memoirs?

Simon: Almost every writer, artist or composer works autobiographically. The work comes out of the sum total of what that person is. I don’t have to tell you the exact experiences; I can make up an entire story of things that never happened to me, but it would still be autobiographical because it’s channeled through my own thought processes. People think “autobiographical’” means that everything written down actually happened to you, but that’s rarely true. It’s; more impressionistic than that. In Brighton Beach Memoirs, which has a great deal to do with my own childhood, there are incident; that are very close to the things that happened, but they are all transposed and happen to different characters. It’s like dream ing of things that happened when you were a child. Some of them you fix up or change without even realizing you’re doing it. You just have a different vision of the way it happened. Sometimes I can swear I remember the way something happened when I was a kid. Then I talk to my brother and he says it never happened that way.

D: You’ve been a successful playwright and screenwriter now for more than 20 years. Do you ever wonder if you’ll run out of ideas?

Simon: No, because there’s always conflict. A play is not like a painting, where you can just show the beauties of nature. The drama is made up of conflict. You can’t have two people on stage for two hours telling each other how much they love each other. The third line has to be, “Ok, you do love me more than I love you.” Then the conflict begins. There’s hardly a moment in the day that isn’t filled with some kind of conflict. It’s how we deal with it that makes life interesting. You can almost bring it to extreme political issues, as George Bernard Shaw did. I mean, think of the absurdity, since the beginning of time, of millions of people killing each other. We still haven’t learned to deal with each other in a humane way.

D: You’ve had incredible success as a writer. You’re by far the most successful playwright of this half-century. Hasn’t that reduced the conflict in your life?

Simon: No, I never thought there would be some magical plateau you would reach. I remember something Picasso said about how he had thought once you became successful, everything would be better-sex, food, everything. It’s not necessarily true. You do have more opportunities for things like that, but actually making it better is a question of taste, luck, timing.. .The people who have the best lives, I think, are the people who are lucky enough to be able to do what they want to do in life, rather than just accept a job. I think that’s the most cursed position you can be in, spending your whole life doing something you don’t like and dreaming of something else. The joy of it all is to change and grow and try to find new outlets for your creativity.

D: In the mid-Seventies, you described yourself as a “creative plant” that was shut down due to ulcers, high blood pressure and anxiety. Was the work getting to you?

Simon: Life pressures get to me much more. I’ve been fairly lucky ever since I started working in the theater. I’ve always made a living at it. My first play [Come Blow Your Horn, 1961] was a success and my second play [Barefoot in the Park, 1963] was a success. God knows I had dry throat and dry mouth when those first plays opened, but that’s never been the real pressure. The breakdowns have come from the stress of doing the work and the tragedies in my life-my wife dying [Joan Simon died of cancer in 1973] and the other changes that go on in your life.

D: You once said that you’d never written a completely satisfactory play. I think you mentioned Star-Spangled Girl as an example of a weak play. What went wrong there?

Simon: That wasn’t a strong play, though I thought it was funny. Strangely enough, in the Samuel French catalogue it’s one of the most successful plays. They do it a lot and it brings in quite a bit of revenue, but it never achieved anything that I wanted it to. I was in a very quick growing period there, going from Barefoot in the Park to Odd Couple. The plays were getting bigger and deeper, even the light comedies. But Star-Spangled Girl went backwards.

D: Unlike most of your work, that play has an underlying political theme, with the left-wing magazine editor felling in love with the ultra-conservative, patriotic woman.

Simon: That’s the only good thing about it. The original concept was to show that people with completely opposing political ideas can be attracted to each other even if they don’t like themselves for being attracted. The sexual impulse is very, very strong, and you fight that impulse when someone is completely opposite your point of view. That was a good basis for the play, but you really have to be Shavian to write that. I didn’t do it. I went a much easier way and tried to make it more accessible to the audience.

D: Both that play and Prisoner of Second Avenue have that political tinge to them, but you don’t go to the point of lengthy exposition of political ideas.

Simon: No, because then you have to get specific about the political ideas. I’d have to say what my particular politics are, and they change from day to day. What I like is taking both sides of the argument. What’s interesting about his political arguments in Prisoner is that they’re almost paranoid, and you can’t refute that, because there is someone out to get you. I’m not talking about a specific villain, but we all have our villains in life, people who are opposed to our way of living. He’s come up against a situation he can’t deal with. He’s 48 years old and it’s too late to start a new life, so he thinks it’s a conspiracy. To me, the enemy is far more dangerous-and far funnier-when it’s not specific.

D: On another subject, did you have any involvement with The Odd Couple television series, or The New Odd Couple?

Simon: No, I just sold them the rights. I never even saw the second series. I only saw the first one after it had been on for three years. It was just too personal to me. I hated the idea that somebody else had taken my child and raised it. But when I finally watched it, I thought the show was very, very good. Tony [Randall] and Jack [Klugman] were wonderful, and they’ll probably be remembered longer than Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon [who did the movie version] or Matthau and Art Carney [who starred in the Broadway production].

D: You’re largely a self-educated man. Do you think that a college education would have added anything to your ability as a playwright?

Simon: I don’t think so. I’ve read so much on my own, and I’ve had great teachers in terms of my writing. I worked with such talented people during my formative years. What university would have given me Sid Caesar and Phil Silvers and Mike Nichols and George C. Scott? A college may help a writer, but it’s not going to make a writer.

D: What do you think is ahead of you as a writer? Are you conscious of developing new powers?

Simon: Maybe not new powers, but new directions, breakthroughs in style. Brighton Beach Memoirs, for instance, is different from any play I ever did before. Most of the other plays were about two people in a conflict. Peripherally, the other people around them were brought into the action. In Brighton Beach, the style has changed. Even though the play centers around the main character, Eugene Jerome, I tried to write it about everyone in the play. I try to tell each of their stories.

D: You’ve had a huge commercial success, but some critics still refuse to take you seriously. Jack Kroll of Newsweek once said that “the opening of a Neil Simon comedy has become the greatest display of conditioned reflexes since Pavlov’s drooling canines,” implying that even your fans don’t pay careful attention to your work. What are your feelings about criticism like that?

Simon: The certain amount of success I’ve had speaks for itself. I don’t know of any writer who hasn’t had his share of knocks. What critics love to do is discover you in the beginning and keep blowing you up bigger and bigger. Then when you’re big enough, they start shooting you down. I’ve done 21 plays, and about 16 of them have been great successes. But a certain group of critics is always going to look upon me as the Establishment Commercial Theater, which automatically puts you one down with them. I’m not Beckett; I don’t write Beckett plays. I wish I could write something like that. But you’re who you are, and you do the best you can. These questions imply that nobody that popular can be very good. If that’s true, why aren’t there more people doing it?

D: How about self-evaluation? How do you know when you’re doing good work, regardless of the critics?

Simon: You’ve got to be your own barometer, which doesn’t mean that you’re always right. When I saw Brighton Beach Memoirs, I liked it, and I knew it was good no matter what the critics said. That’s the first time I won the New York Drama Critics Award-not that I put any stock in that, because if you do, you have to worry about the plays you didn’t get it for. But I’ve had more accolades about this play than for any I’ve written. I think I accomplished what I tried to do.

D: Do you ever worry that perhaps your name alone might carry a weak play?

Simon: It never would. It might bring some people into the theater out of curiosity. But people pay a lot of money for tickets, and they want to make sure the play is really good. They wait for the critics and the word-of-mouth. Audiences still expect a certain kind of entertainment from me, and I don’t think their evaluation will ever change, the way it didn’t change about Noel Coward. He said he had a talent to amuse. Sometimes he far surpassed that, and sometimes he just amused. Sometimes he didn’t even amuse. Probably, I’m somewhere in the same group. I entertain. I hope I touch people.

D: After all this time, is it still fun?

Simon: Yeah, it is. It was more frightening in the beginning because I didn’t know when I was on the right track. The hardest thing is to come up with new and original ways of presenting plays or movies. But it’s not a question of whether it’s fun or not. It’s just part of your existence. My life has changed so drastically. The enthusiasm is a little harder to get up for the productions, but not the writing. The writing always takes me to a place where I’m most comfortable, but spending 10 weeks in a hotel room with the actors is not fun. I don’t like being in Hollywood, driving out to a soundstage, or rehearsing in New York for six weeks. But the writing has a life of its own. It’s com pulsive. If you’re on to something, you can’t stop it. I’ve lost a lot of things in my life, but I haven’t lost my work. If you lose your work-the thing that best expresses what you are-then you’ve lost everything.