Word: playwrights
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When Neil Simon's 23rd play, Broadway Bound, opened in New York City last week, TIME Theater Critic William A. Henry III judged it the best American play of the 1980s. He happily proclaims that news in his cover profile of the playwright, which was written with reports from Los Angeles Correspondent Elaine Dutka. Says Henry: "There is a saying in the theater that there's nothing wrong with Broadway three hits won't cure. In any season that Neil Simon brings out a play, the problem is one-third solved...
...really like my coat?'" Lavin recalls Simon's coming to rehearsal with a bad cold and remarking that even the clothes in his closet were sneezing. When one of Simon's daughters told Silverman, who plays Eugene Jerome, that he resembled pictures of Simon at the same age, the playwright turned and said, "The only piece of advice I have for you is 'Hold onto your hair...
...deeper resonance between present and past, between work and an inner sense of self. And so he subtly but surely changed careers. America's master joke-meister moved away from the neatly rounded, readily palatable social comment that had made him the world's most popular living playwright. He stopped setting plays among hip and prosperous insiders like himself, dwelling in the Meccas of Manhattan or Beverly Hills. He began instead to evoke the bygone lives of the world he came from, people so conscious of their ordinariness, their smallness, their vulnerability to vast social forces that for them laughter...
...Simon is back on Broadway, where he is the only living playwright to have had a theater named for him. He rounds out his autobiographical trilogy with Broadway Bound, a tough and unsettling recollection of the breakup of his parents' marriage and of how he walked out on that wreckage to launch his own career. The play's central image, its emotional climax, is that long-contemplated connection of mother and son, talking and dancing and?for just a moment?spiritually touching. "Until I wrote it," says Simon, "I had not fully resolved how I truly felt about my mother...
...being the majority backer of his plays, which nowadays cost around $800,000 to mount. Nor will the show's fate much affect his power: his record is so strong that his name appears above the title on many of his plays and movies, a rare honor for a playwright and an all but unprecedented one for a screenwriter who is not also a director. Virtually anything Simon writes will be produced?if he permits it. His collaborator on nine films, Producer Ray Stark, says Simon "will bring in the most wonderful material and then, two weeks later, when...