The Middle-Class Playwright

Neil Simon, who died last week, was to the theater what Woody Allen is to the movies and what Paul Simon (no relation!) is to popular music - a spokesman of New York Jewish angst who tapped into the psyche of a generation of Americans, regardless of their religious, ethnic, or geographical background, who reached their goals in life and found something wanting.  He wrote plays about the prosperous middle class and their various hangups and disappointments, often to find great comedy in their exploits, from the newly married couple second-guessing their union in Barefoot in the Park to the entrapped middle-aged executive in The Prisoner of Second Avenue.  He brought that same talent to original movie screenplays, one of the best examples being his script for the 1977 Herbert Ross film The Goodbye Girl, focusing on two mismatched performing artists forced to share an apartment while trying to make it in the highly competitive New York theater world.  Simon's plays and movie scripts left you rooting for these flawed but  likable characters, with so much wry dialogue and sharp observations - the sort of writing actors live for and the sort of work anyone who ever tried to write a play (myself included!) wished they could produce.  No one else could ever be Neil Simon; that position was already taken.

His best work ever was his 1965 Broadway play The Odd Couple, a hilarious tale of two divorced men - one an uptight neat-freak, the other a laid-back slob - trying to share a an apartment without driving each other crazy.  The cohabitation of these two longtime friends plays out like a marriage, with all of the irony that applies.  By the time the story is over, Felix the neat-freak has become more relaxed, while the easygoing Oscar suddenly discovers the value of cleanliness.  Though this one joke made for a decent sitcom in the early 1970s with Tony Randall as Felix and Jack Klugman as Oscar, it was Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, who respectively played Felix and Oscar in the 1968 movie version, who delivered the definitive portrayals of these characters.  (Matthau originated the role of Oscar in the original Broadway production, opposite Art Carney as Felix; Klugman would replace Matthau on Broadway before reprising the role on TV.)  No two actors than Lemmon and Matthau were better suited for the play that became Simon's Mona Lisa, his defining masterpiece, with its wit, its humor, its pathos, and its display of brotherly love between two mismatched but very human friends, brought to vibrant life on the screen by Simon's longtime professional collaborator, director Gene Saks.  If you see only one movie with either an original Neil Simon screenplay or a Simon screenplay adapted from one of his plays, this is it.  

Sadly, Simon's work may seem passé to today's middle class, no longer materially comfortable and now having to worry about economic concerns that never affected newswriter Felix and sportswriter Oscar, or even The Goodbye Girl's title character Paula McFadden . . . and  Simon's erudite, dry humor may no doubt go unappreciated today thanks to the dumbing of America in the twenty-first-century.  Simon remains the gold standard for smart comedy, and now more than ever, we must protect his legacy.  RIP.