(2 of 10)
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 of true moral courage. It won what he considered an "overdue" Tony for best play—it was his 21st Broadway production—and it too may become a movie.
Now 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. I had no idea I had been so dependent on her. That is an erotic, truly intimate love scene."
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."
Its 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—if he permits it. His collaborator on nine films, Producer Ray Stark, says Simon "will bring in the most wonderful material and then, two weeks later, when I ask where it is, he will reply, 'Not good enough.' He still has a wonderful humility about his work and has about 150 first acts in his trunk." Simon's motivation seems not to be glory either. He is intensely private, says one of his best friends, Broadway Bound Producer Emanuel Azenberg: "Although he is very diligent during the rehearsing and rewriting, when we open the shows to the public, his interest diminishes precipitously." Simon himself says, "I like the work, I like the opportunity for control over my life, but I don't like being Neil Simon the public figure. Now that this show is open, I plan to get away from that for a while."