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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 to share that opinion. They expect that after decades of acclaim as a craftsman, Neil Simon may finally come to be regarded as an artist. Says John Randolph, who plays Simon's grandfather in Broadway Bound: "It was classic, that opening night in Washington. He spent all these years waiting for some critic to recognize that he is a major, important, serious playwright, which this play proves. And as soon as he had a copy of a review saying that, he was absolutely overcome."
Moments after the curtain has risen, a puckish young man called Eugene Morris Jerome bounds into his Brooklyn family home, shaking with cold, and tells his grandfather an impromptu joke about the weather: "I saw a man kissing his wife on the corner, and they got stuck to each other. Mr. Jacobs, the tailor, is blowing hot steam on them." His grandfather, as always, sees nothing funny in Eugene's whimsy. Weeks later, Eugene moves out to start a new life as a comedy writer for network radio in Manhattan. His grandfather, ever wary of affection, wonders whether he will have to endure a parting embrace. Eugene replies, "I'm going to kiss you right on the lips. They're going to have to pull us apart." This time his grandfather gets the joke.
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. Simon views the background of the play as "a war, a household war." Yet the play looks at grim events with a tempered optimism, a belief not so much in happy endings as in the renewable dignity of human beings. Simon, always generous to his characters, seeks the utmost in forgiveness for them here. He will not take sides, not even in the battle between a mother deserted by the only man she has ever loved and a father looking for the joy and tenderness that he has long been denied at home. Most of the play's key battles go unresolved: they are conflicts that must be lived with. As if in conscious rejection of the imposed neatness in his earlier plays, Simon has his surrogate Eugene Jerome say at the play's end, "Contrary to popular belief, everything in life doesn't come to a clear-cut conclusion."