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The play's most rewarding role is not Eugene, as in the earlier plays of the trilogy, but his mother. Linda Lavin (of TV's Alice) gives a stunning performance. After a first act in which she seems to be a short-tempered drudge, this long-suffering mother gradually transmutes shrewishness and emotional blackmail into fidelity and a kind of noble forbearance. That transformation is the basic movement of the play. There is not a moment of sentiment or self-indulgence in Lavin's evocation, nor in the woman she is playing.
The Jerome brothers are screaming at each other about how to write a radio skit. Eugene, the younger, keeps tossing out what he thinks are funny situations. Stanley insists on order and method. The keys to comedy, he says, are "conflict" and "wanting," and every detail must make sense. Eugene demands, "It's just a comedy sketch. Does it have to be so logical?" Stanley, the self-appointed teacher, replies, "It's not funny if it's not believable."
Marvin Neil Simon was born July 4, 1927. He grew up not in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, but in Washington Heights at the northern end of Manhattan. The family never had much money, he says. "There were definite class distinctions depending on where you lived. People next to the park who got a breeze in summer were considered wealthy. All of our rooms faced walls or the backs of houses." Simon's father Irving, like the father in the trilogy, worked in the garment industry. Recalls Simon: "Like Willy Loman, he learned to ingratiate himself with his customers. He wasn't a particularly bright man and had only a grade-school education. I remember him as being a great laugher, a great audience."
The most conspicuous thing about Simon's father was his absence: his marriage was stormy, and he was often away for protracted periods, leaving his wife Mamie and the boys, Neil and Danny, who was eight years older, to fend for themselves. Says Simon: "Each time he came back I thought, 'At last, we're together.' But it kept on like a yo-yo." Mamie Simon was resourceful: she worked at Gimbel's department store; she ran poker games in the house and took a cut of each pot. At the hardest times Neil and his mother were taken in by kindly relatives, a situation Simon reversed in Brighton Beach, where he portrayed his family as the host rather than the guest. On other occasions Mamie took in boarders: her son particularly remembers two butchers who paid part of their rent in meat.
Throughout Neil's childhood and adolescence, the strongest male influence in his life was his older brother Danny. From the start, Danny believed in his kid brother's limitless potential. According to Simon, Danny endowed him with the nickname "Doc"—an appellation for which there have been more interpretations than the Rosetta Stone—at age two. Neil was playing with a toy stethoscope, and Danny burst out, "This kid is gonna be a doctor." As Neil grew up, Danny enthusiastically envisioned him as America's greatest baseball player and, later, the world's foremost comic genius. He backed up this boosterism with hard work: Danny dragged Neil into writing. Both brothers say that without Danny's coaching, the shy and initially indolent Neil would never have developed the craft.