Word: laughters
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...main thing wrong with Laughter on the 23rd Floor, Simon's affectionate memoir of those days, is that this manic style of writing, which he vividly recalls in conversation, is never really seen onstage. The play, which opened on Broadway last week, will delight Simon fans who yearn for the days when he wrote to be funny, without the poignant self-analysis that has enriched such late works as Broadway Bound and Jake's Women. For those who admire these later plays and think he found in them his great theme -- the making of a writer and the moral conundrums...
...conveys the writers' affection for their chief performer. But it leaves unexplored the vital conflict within each writer and between them all -- the egotism of being an artist vs. the collaborative necessities of cranking out scripts at such speed. Indeed, not much about these people stamps them as writers. Laughter sends up any office life. That may give it wider appeal and a longer run. But it deprives the play of depth...
...owes much to Biloxi: a group in thrall to a dangerous leader, a boot camp that hardens the head more than the heart, a tense scene where some teammate is to be unjustly cast out, a summing-up of everyone's future fate. But Biloxi had tragic overtones, while Laughter on the 23rd Floor is comedy, comedy...
Works by both the country's most successful veteran playwright and its most idolized newcomer opened on Broadway. Neil Simon returned to the stage with Laughter on the 23rd Floor, a nostalgic comedy based on his days as a writer for Sid Caesar. The other debut, Perestroika, is the second half of Tony Kushner's Pulitzer-prizewinning age-of-AIDS epic, Angels in America. Critics were far kinder to Kushner than to Simon...
...then the husband committed suicide. Finally, we see the woodcutter's eyewitness version, in which Tajomaru fights with the husband at the wife's insistence, and the fight we see is anything but glamorous. It is a brawl between two frightened, panting men goaded by the woman's laughter and impugning of their manhood...