Word: simonizing
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Writing is the one constant in Simon's life. Says Trilogy Director Gene Saks, one of Simon's valued friends: "He never stops writing because of any personal problem; it is his great release, and he never has writer's block." Daughter Ellen says her "earliest recollection was of sneaking past the door when he was writing. I always felt that I didn't have his full attention. He seemed to be distant, in his own world." For Simon, the early stages of writing a play are a kind of Freudian trek through the subconscious: "There's no blueprint...
...Simon on first meeting seems more like an accountant than a comic wit. Although he can be a deft public performer, the private man is a thoughtful, earnest conversationalist, never a raconteur using companions as an audience. He realizes he is considered aloof even by those who know him best, and admits, "I'm always having to tell myself, 'Get back into the conversation.'" When he does get off a good line, it is a throwaway, almost sotto voce, and rarely with a stranger. Director Mike Nichols, who staged four of Simon's plays, recalls attending one in which...
...Simon aged (he is now 59), he increasingly felt a longing that comes to many creative people in later life: the urge for a 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...
Perhaps the most dramatic instance of rewriting in Simon's entire career is the scene of mother and son dancing in Broadway Bound. There was no hint of it in the original version. Instead there was a scene between Eugene and his girlfriend Josie, a character intended to represent Simon's first wife. Early in rehearsals it became apparent the scene was not working. "I realized it was in the wrong play," says Simon. "Some other time I will write about Joan. She needs a whole play to herself. Right then I had the idea of a scene between Eugene...
First in this new voice was 1983's Brighton Beach Memoirs, an ultimately comforting but nonetheless troubled vision of Simon's boyhood during the late 1930s. The show accumulated honors: the New York Drama Critics Circle prize for best play, a hit production at Britain's National Theater that transferred last week to London's West End, and a film version, also written by Simon, that opens nationwide in the U.S. on Christmas Day. Next Simon wrote 1985's Biloxi Blues, an astringent look at World War II Army recruits (including himself) whose macho bravado often obscured a lack...