Word: simonizing
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...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...
Broadway Bound plainly means something very special, and not altogether comfortable, to Simon. At the opening night of the preview run in Washington, he collapsed with what appeared to be a heart attack. The seizure was later diagnosed as a gastric disturbance and a bad case of jitters. Says he: "This was the easiest play of mine to write but the most difficult to watch...
...importance to him is clearly not a matter of money: Simon, whose net worth is estimated at a minimum of $30 million, can afford the luxury of 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?...
Broadway Bound's significance for Simon is emotional. It is his most honest, unromanticized look at where he came from, a show so powerfully evocative that both he and his brother Danny have wept openly while watching it in performance. He admits, "I feel funny about being rewarded for laying out the bones of my family and myself. Even now, I suspect I would not 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...
...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...