The last of Neil Simon’s 30 plays or musicals to open in America’s main theatre district was called 45 Seconds from Broadway (2001). It was a suitable climactic title. For the preceding four decades, Broadway theatregoers had rarely been more than a minute or so from a Simon play.

The first productions of his works achieved around 18,000 performances between them, making, at the usual rate of eight shows a week, a combined 44 Broadway years, a total further swollen by revivals of several hits. Given the decrease in the number of openings and increase in diversity of voices, it seems unlikely any dramatist will ever better Simon’s Broadway statistics.

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His status as American commercial theatre’s de facto writer in residence was recognised in 1983, when the Alvin Theatre on Manhattan’s West 52nd Street was re-named the Neil Simon Theatre.

Simon’s longest runners were Barefoot in the Park (1963) and Brighton Beach Memoirs (1982), typically autobiographical spins on respectively his first marriage (of five) and his 1930s childhood, and The Odd Couple (1965), one of several comedies in which living together exposed tensions between an optimist and a pessimist.

Marvin Neil Simon was born in a celebrated American place – New York City – on a celebratory date – 4 July – and these fates of birth can be seen to have shaped his writing.

Almost all of his stage plays were set in Manhattan, the Bronx or further upstate. And, in aiming for comic fireworks, Simon struck a note of festive independence from the classically influenced tragic tone of the other major 20th-century American playwrights: Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and Sam Shepard.

Simon’s focus on comedy routinely led to his being marked down by the adjudicators of theatrical greatness, a common fate for literary wits. He would often be described as “the American Alan Ayckbourn”, just as the Scarborough-based dramatist was routinely introduced to US audiences as “the British Neil Simon”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Simon with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau – the stars of The Odd Couple – in 1998. Photograph: Timothy White/Paramount/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

In fact, their work is very different, Simon favouring formal gags and wisecracks while Ayckbourn’s humour arises from intricately achieved changes in situation and staging. But the two men overlapped in being critically underrated and having most success at home. While Simon had several West End hits – including a tremendous version of The Sunshine Boys, with Danny De Vito and Richard Griffiths in 2012 – he was essentially a Broadway institution.

Simon’s apprenticeship had been in radio and television in the 1950s, primarily serving as a gag writer on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, an experience mined in his 1993 stage play, Laughter on the 23rd Floor. In common with many of the personnel in comedy broadcasting – including Caesar himself, and writers Woody Allen and Mel Brooks – Simon was Jewish American, and stands as a key representative of that dominant voice, laughing against the darkness of life, love and death, in modern American writing. Of his near-contemporary Jewish New Yorkers, Philip Roth chose the novel, Allen and Brooks cinema. Simon always planned a route from TV to the theatre.

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The crucial influence of television remained, though, Simon’s favoured form being a stage version of that small-screen staple, the situation comedy, and, in particular the staple TV sub-genre of the awkward housemates. Simon’s first three Broadway hits put uncomfortable couples in a living room. In Come Blow Your Horn (1961), a nervous virgin man moves in with his playboy brother; Barefoot in the Park (1963) features newly-weds adjusting to their marital home; and The Odd Couple (1965) sends a husband kicked out by his wife to stay with a bachelor friend. Another of these scary pairings spawned The Sunshine Boys (1972), in which a comedy duo, not on speaking terms for 11 years, reluctantly get together for a gig.



Simon frequently drew inspiration from recent events in his own life, so that Chapter Two (1977), where a man’s second wife has to help him to come to terms with the death of his first, explicitly reflected Simon’s marriages to Joan Baim (who died from cancer in 1973), and the actor Marsha Mason who, quadrupling the double-take, played her surrogate character on both stage and film.

Simon’s rare ability to depict the behaviour of relatives, friends and lovers in a pressured situation will endure

It was the farther personal past, though, that gave the writer his greatest later acclaim, through what became known as “the Eugene trilogy”, premiered over four years in the mid-1980s. Eugene Simon, played in each stage premiere by Matthew Broderick, is a lightly-disguised version of Simon, seen in adolescence in the Bronx (Brighton Beach Memoirs), second world war military service (Biloxi Blues), and then as an aspiring comedy writer (Broadway Bound). Whereas earlier characters had often been deracinated – the super-Wasp Robert Redford had starred in Barefoot in the Park – the trilogy was specifically Jewish American.

Brighton Beach Memoirs heavily channeled Simon’s own unhappy childhood as one of two sons of a cloth salesman during the Great Depression of the 1930s. At a technical level, the memory-play formats allowed Simon, until then known for snappy dialogue, to exercise his monologue muscle, while the three double-Bs in the titles reflected a tidy mind. His acceptance of the brutal rules of American commercial theatre was shown by the second and third chapters only being written once their predecessor had become a proven hit. This strain of family history continued affectingly in Lost in Yonkers (1990), in which young brothers, after their mother’s death, are billeted with their dragonish grandmother. Another Broadway long-runner, it brought Simon the higher literary recognition that his work had been denied, with the award of the Pulitzer prize.

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In Rewrites (1996), the first of two volumes of memoir, Simon explained his theory that a play should ideally start from some triggering event that is happening for the first time. Although the narrative of Hamlet seems to rise from the backstory of the Danish prince’s father’s murder and his uncle’s hasty marriage to his mother, Shakespeare only has a play, Simon pointed out, when the father’s ghost first appears to his son. Learning from this, his apartment-share dramas begin on the first day of living together or, in The Sunshine Boys, the comedians’ nervous reconciliatory handshake. Broadway Bound kicks off with Eugene discovering an infidelity that threatens his parents’ marriage.

This understanding of dramatic mechanics earned Simon much early work as a Broadway “play doctor”, tickling up struggling comedies by others, and as he revealed in the second autobiography, The Play Goes On (1999), even adding some emergency last-minute gags to the musical A Chorus Line.

Respect for Simon’s script-craft was such that, in Hollywood, where screenplays are notoriously prone to pass through multiple hands, he achieved 20 solo writing credits, mainly for adaptations of the plays, receiving four Oscar nominations, between 1968 and 78, for The Odd Couple, The Sunshine Boys, The Goodbye Girl and California Suite. His key movie muse was Walter Matthau, who played both one of the odd couple and one of the sunshine boys.

Simon always emphasised that his comedies had dark roots, once summarising the “common themes” of his plays as: “The abandoned child, a father with a failing heart (my father died of one), and a mother dying of cancer … Always abandonment in one form or other.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Neil Simon on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, 1980. Photograph: NBC/Getty Images

And, as is common with comic writers, he was drawn to more solemn models. For Woody Allen, it is the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. For Simon, the great Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. This enthusiasm was not as counterintuitive as it might seem – Chekhov always classified The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard and other plays as comedies – but Simon struggled to sell his homage products to the Broadway public. His two plays set in Russia – The Good Doctor (1973) and Fools (1981) – were rare flops, the latter managing only 40 performances.

Such more serious subtext reflected Simon’s long-term struggles with depression and illnesses, including a chronic renal condition resolved, in 2003, by a transplant kidney from his long-time publicist, Bill Evans.

In earlier years, that extraordinary gift of friendship would have triggered a play, but Simon had retired from theatre that same year with Rose’s Dilemma, seen only in a small off-Broadway theatre in a production disrupted by the sudden departure of star Mary Tyler Moore, reportedly after a letter from Simon imploring her to learn the words.

The 2009 flop of a Broadway revival of Brighton Beach Memoirs and Broadway Bound showed Simon was not immune to the sudden unfashionableness that afflicted Miller and Williams in the latter part of their careers. But The Odd Couple had yet another afterlife as a Matthew Perry CBS sitcom from 2015 to 2017, suggesting that Simon’s rare ability to depict the behaviour of relatives, friends and lovers in a pressured situation will endure.