Word: neils
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...Marvin Neil Simon was born July 4, 1927. He grew up not in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, but in Washington Heights at the northern end of Manhattan. The family never had much money, he says. "There were definite class distinctions depending on where you lived. People next to the park who got a breeze in summer were considered wealthy. All of our rooms faced walls or the backs of houses." Simon's father Irving, like the father in the trilogy, worked in the garment industry. Recalls Simon: "Like Willy Loman, he learned to ingratiate himself with his customers. He wasn...
...Broadway Bound Producer Emanuel Azenberg: "Although he is very diligent during the rehearsing and rewriting, when we open the shows to the public, his interest diminishes precipitously." Simon himself says, "I like the work, I like the opportunity for control over my life, but I don't like being Neil Simon the public figure. Now that this show is open, I plan to get away from that for a while...
...have written it if my parents were alive." Broadway Bound is also, in his view, his best play, the one he would like to be remembered by. His family, friends and professional associates all seem to share that opinion. They expect that after decades of acclaim as a craftsman, Neil Simon may finally come to be regarded as an artist. Says John Randolph, who plays Simon's grandfather in Broadway Bound: "It was classic, that opening night in Washington. He spent all these years waiting for some critic to recognize that he is a major, important, serious playwright, which this...
...Neil Simon is America's foremost stage comedist, the theatrical equivalent of Woody Allen in the movies. Even in his weakest plays that gift of laughter has never faltered, and it is in full flower in his trilogy. But for all its exuberant humor, Broadway Bound is a comedy only in the sense that Chekhov meant Uncle Vanya to be seen as a comedy. Its subjects include the dissolution of two marriages, the estrangements of a father from a daughter and of another father from his sons, the terminal cancer of one offstage character and the accidental death of another...
...most conspicuous thing about Simon's father was his absence: his marriage was stormy, and he was often away for protracted periods, leaving his wife Mamie and the boys, Neil and Danny, who was eight years older, to fend for themselves. Says Simon: "Each time he came back I thought, 'At last, we're together.' But it kept on like a yo-yo." Mamie Simon was resourceful: she worked at Gimbel's department store; she ran poker games in the house and took a cut of each pot. At the hardest times Neil and his mother were taken...