Word: simonizes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...other parts of the trilogy, Eugene speaks to the audience in asides. But here the voice in those asides is not the young man of the play explaining his inner thoughts; he is the older and wiser writer looking back and assessing the consequential forces in his life. Says Simon: "The audience listens attentively because it knows this character is going to become a very successful writer who will write the play the audience is seeing." This frank, almost naked address to the audience gives the play a startling immediacy, despite its nostalgic setting, and a confessional tone far less...
...audiences who come to the theater for feeling rather than anesthesia, for honesty rather than comfort, Broadway Bound should firmly establish Simon's standing in the top rank of American playwrights. He does not attempt to do what Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams and Sam Shepard have done: create their own worlds and mesmerize viewers into them. Simon evokes a world very much like the viewers' own and entices them into confronting their own feelings. Broadway Bound is the work of a master craftsman, at once literary and heartfelt, shaped with becoming modesty. It is unmistakably urban and Jewish...
...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...
Throughout Neil's childhood and adolescence, the strongest male influence in his life was his older brother Danny. From the start, Danny believed in his kid brother's limitless potential. According to Simon, Danny endowed him with the nickname "Doc"?an appellation for which there have been more interpretations than the Rosetta Stone?at age two. Neil was playing with a toy stethoscope, and Danny burst out, "This kid is gonna be a doctor." As Neil grew up, Danny enthusiastically envisioned him as America's greatest baseball player and, later, the world's foremost comic genius. He backed...