I've just seen a surprisingly satisfying female version of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple, and it's led me to reflect on Simon and his career. The production was at the USF School of Theatre, featured students (and one recent graduate) in all parts, and was as rough around the edges as you might expect in a summertime university production. But it was also very funny, and a good reminder of Simon's considerable, if peculiarly limited, talents. Here are just a few of the thoughts that it provoked:
Two Types of Success. There was a time in the 1960s when just about anyone would have told you that the most successful playwright in America was Neil Simon. After all, this was the decade when he had a string of hits in Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, Plaza Suite and several others. And it was in the '60s that he had four successful shows all running on Broadway at the same time. In other words, Simon dominated American theater in mid-century in a way few playwrights have ever dared aspire to.The problem was, some people took this success to mean that he was also America's "best" playwright – and that was a mistake. Because for all his talent, the Simon of those years had next to nothing to say about any subject of importance. The USF Odd Couple is a perfect example of a play in which much is at stake for the characters, but nothing – no idea, no cause, no truth – is at stake for the audience.
Florence (Aisha Duran) has just been dumped by her husband Sidney and is flailing about in a suicidal funk. Her divorced friend Olive (Johanna Herre) invites her to move in – it'll be nice, thinks Olive, to have a roommate after months of loneliness. But Olive is a sloppy, beer-swilling sports nut and Florence is a fastidious, detail-obsessed perfectionist, and it's not long before the two are driving each other crazy.
Enter two Spanish neighbors (Gregory Geffrard and Phillip Gulley), whose English is abominable and whose etiquette is excessive. It's a recipe for great farce – of no significance whatsoever.
These characters stand for nothing. This plot is in no way allegorical. This is theater as pastime, more amusing than a crossword puzzle but not a bit more momentous. Inevitably, it became the duty of conscientious theater critics of the '60s to remind their readers that Simon's plays, for all their success, were essentially trifles.
Were the critics being snooty, elitist, anti-populist? No, they were just upholding a tradition that from Aeschylus to Tennessee Williams (or, speaking about comedy, from Aristophanes to Molière to Shaw) had insisted that theater treat the real struggles of its audience. And there were some important writers working at that time – Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard among them. No, the critics were simply telling it like it was: Simon had one kind of success but not the other.
Getting Personal. After Simon's first wife died – a cataclysm in his life, according to his memoirs – something changed in his approach to theater. The most obvious example was his play Chapter Two (1977), which was explicitly about the difficulty of moving on to a new relationship after the loss of a spouse. The critical response was predictable: Simon was finally writing about real emotion, and this was the breakthrough for which every theater lover had been waiting. But if you look at Chapter Two today, you find that for all its honesty, it's the work of a man who has no important insights into grief or its sequels.
Lack of depth is all the more evident in the first of a trio of 1980s plays based on Simon's own life: Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound. In Brighton Beach, we meet the Jerome family – based on the Simons – and we witness their struggles in Depression-era Brooklyn. But these conflicts are described without being analyzed: sexual coming-of-age, the fight to keep gainful employment, surviving the loss of a loved one, choosing between education and career. Simon comes across here as a compassionate camera, but what we want from the theater are X-rays. One leaves the "facts" of Brighton Beach as unilluminated as ever.
But then Simon did have a breakthrough, and I don't mean the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lost in Yonkers. No, the best of all Simon plays is, to my mind, Broadway Bound, about the Jerome brothers' aspirations to a life writing comedy, and about the disintegrating marriage of their parents Kate and Jack.
Here at last Simon achieves a real exploration of life's ambiguities, especially when he shows us the young Jeromes using painful events in their own family as springboards for their comedy routines. The subjects Simon broaches here – from adultery to opportunism – are certainly important, and the playwright brings them to our attention with an impressively gentle honesty. Still, there's nothing really unique here, none of the piercing originality that marks a Death of a Salesman or Buried Child or Wit. No, Simon at his best still isn't in the first rank of dramatic authors. He's just a kindly, thoughtful presence with a smidgen of extra insight.
And Yet… And yet, watching the TheatreUSF version of The Odd Couple, you can't help but note that the early Simon, the farceur, the constructor of meaningless pastimes, is really quite masterful. As directed by David Mann, this student show is at times nothing short of hilarious, much funnier than many a professional production that I've sat through. The two Spanish brothers trying to communicate with Olive and Florence; Olive, enraged, spraying Florence's linguine with disinfectant; Olive complaining about tidy Florence, "I can't even have dirty dreams, you come in and clean them up" – these are wonderfully silly moments.
So maybe, just maybe, it's a mistake to lament Simon's shallowness. So what if The Odd Couple, even in this female version, is all surface; on the surface, from time to time, it's terrifically amusing.
So he's no Eugene O'Neill.
In his element, Neil Simon may still be the funniest guy around.
This article appears in Jun 22-28, 2005.
