The Play Goes On: A Memoir

Amazon.com
Despite its somber opening on the day in 1973 just after he buried his wife, Joan, this second volume of Neil Simon's memoirs is frequently as funny as his plays. The real estate agent who shows him and second wife Marsha Mason around Los Angeles reminds him so much of Sunset Boulevard's Norma Desmond, he remarks, "I immediately started looking around the car for the dead monkey." When he phones his brother and says, "Danny, I just won the Pulitzer Prize" (for Lost in Yonkers), Danny's response is, "Wait a second, I have to stop the water in my bath." If Simon harbored any malice, some of his wry barbs might really sting. Instead, he's gentlemanly and uncontrite about the failure of his marriage to Mason ("it takes two to untangle," he opines), and even more reticent about his relationship with wife number 3 who was also number 4, which didn't work out either time. Writing plays like Brighton Beach Memoirs and Broadway Bound sparks more enthusiastic prose, and Simon's gushing about his three daughters is done in a manner so corny it's positively endearing. For a man who believes he became successful "by feeding off my own insecurities and sharing them with a world of people," Simon, at age 71, seems pretty well-adjusted. --Wendy Smith


From Publishers Weekly
Simon begins his hauntingly sad yet often quite funny second memoir (following his 1996 Rewrites) in 1973, on the day after the burial of his first wife, who died of cancer. Things look bad at first, as the massively successful American playwright (he's won the Pulitzer Prize and three Tony awards, and written 40 plays and almost as many original and adapted screenplays) can't even get out of bed. It thus comes as a great relief, if also something of a surprise, when Simon meets and marries actress Marsha Mason three months later. In Mason, Simon finds not only an outstanding interpreter of his words (Goodbye Girl, Only When I Laugh), but also an inspiration (Chapter Two, a play about a widower's second marriage). When his relationship with Mason collapses nine years later, Simon plunges back into a depression that is exacerbated by his first-ever career slump. Eventually, he applies a combination of innovative personal therapies (he spends a lot of time with his dog and shoots a pistol into his swimming pool) and professional luck (he stumbles over a draft of the eventual megahit Brighton Beach Memoirs that he had penned several years before) and claws his way out of his slump. His greatest successes still lay ahead (along with another marriageAand divorce and remarriage) in the form of his BB trilogy (Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound), featuring his alter ego Eugene Jerome. Simon says that a memoir should serve two functions: "to pass on as much as you're willing to tell" and "to discover a truth about yourself you never had the time or courage to face before." A superb and introspective raconteur, he achieves both goals many times over in this exhilarating book. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
"Just as I never plan what play or film I might write next, I don't plan on what I will write next in these memoirs," says Simon. Well, Neil, it certainly shows. Readers plodding through this second self-portrait will find it hard to believe that this is the same person who wrote The Odd Couple and The Sunshine Boys. While Simon's stage dialog crackles with wit, his first-person narrative voice is as flat as the paper it's written on. This book picks up where his first memoir, Rewrites, concluded; here Simon provides a laundry list of his mid-life achievements, from winning a Pulitzer Prize to marrying and divorcing women in less time than it takes most guys to wear out a pair of sneakers. The book's most interesting moments come when Simon talks about the creative act of writingAwhich isn't very often. Nonetheless, given Simon's enormous popularity, this book is still an important purchase for all public and large academic libraries.-AMichael Rogers, "Library Journal" Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Simon made his name with lighthearted, middlebrow comedies about middle-class New Yorkers battling life in the city. In the early '80s, first in Brighton Beach Memoirs, he changed his style. The plays became darker, their stories more bittersweet, their characters more complex. Simon no longer used jokes to shield strong feelings but instead used humor to open up his characters' rich emotional lives. Why he changed is one of the unstated questions that powers this memoir, a companion volume to Rewrites (1996). It recounts the second half of Simon's life, starting with the life-shattering impact of the death of his first wife, Joan, of cancer at 40, and proceeding through the ensuing 30 years, during which Simon had periods of incredible fertility and others in which his creativity dried up and he feared he would never write again. Simon pays close attention to the ups and downs of his emotional life, including his further marriages, to actress Marsha Mason and to Diane Lander, and the low points after each marriage cracked up. Simon's memoir is warm, open, and highly readable, and though its tone is confessional, Simon avoids the narcissistic excesses that mar many autobiographies. He is a born wordsmith, and his rich, rare, wise memoir is as enjoyable as a good novel. Jack Helbig


From Kirkus Reviews
Our most successful playwright (and ``also the most underestimated,'' Clive Barnes once wrote) brings us up-to-date on his life since the death of his adored wife, Joan. In this authorized autobiography, he starts the day after the close of his earlier memoir (Rewrites, 1996). Simon has written, aside from screenplays, some 30 playsso far putting him within hailing distance of Shakespeare in terms of production (and the Bard never wrote sketches for Sid Caesar). In this installment, as before, he tells of his work habits, how the plays came to be, and the events in his life that inspired each one. Readers familiar with works like the ``Brighton Beach'' trilogy, Chapter Two and Jake's Women will know a lot of Simon's story. You may think of his memoir as a comprehensive and valuable annotation to the onstage history. But, of course, it's more than that. Its an intimate and engaging narrative about his real-life progeny as well as his imagined characters. Its an affectionate and warm view of his marriage to and divorce from actress Marsha Mason. Then there were his two marriages to and two divorces from a comely lady he found behind a counter at Nieman Marcus. He treats his former wives with consideration. (Except for a speech he used in Chapter Two, their views are not recorded). Its a show book, too, with anecdotes about such luminaries as Sean Connery, Robert De Niro, and Tony Curtis, and there is an especially sharp one-liner from George Burns. Naturally, the author can put a button on a scene and close it with a funny line. But funny only goes so far. The old clich about the comedian who nurses sadness beneath the motley is true after all. Writing at age 71, Simon offers a chiaroscuro tale, one of remembered joy, present melancholy, and remarkable professional achievement. Here is a memoir from an instinctively personal playwright, as forthright and also as circumspect as a memoir ought to be. What Simon says is witty and felicitous. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
Publishers Weekly Exhilarating...Simon is a superb and introspective raconteur.


Book Description
In his critically acclaimed Rewrites, Neil Simon talked about his beginnings -- his early years of working in television, his first real love, his first play, his first brush with failure, and, most moving of all, his first great loss. Simon's same willingness to open his heart to the reader permeates The Play Goes On. This second act takes the reader from the mid-1970s to the present, a period in which Simon wrote some of his most popular and critically acclaimed plays, including the Brighton Beach trilogy and Lost in Yonkers, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Simon experienced enormous professional success during this time, but in his personal life he struggled to find that same sense of happiness and satisfaction. After the death of his first wife, he and his two young daughters left New York for Hollywood. There he remarried, and when that foundered he remarried again. Told with his characteristic humor and unflinching sense of irony, The Play Goes On is rich with stories of how Simon's art came to imitate his life. Simon's forty-plus plays make up a body of work that is a long-running memoir in its own right, yet here, in a deeper and more personal book than his first volume, Simon offers a revealing look at an artist in crisis but still able and willing to laugh at himself.


About the Author
America's most prolific and beloved playwright, Neil Simon is the author of more than two dozen plays and screenplays. In 1990, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He is also the winner of three Tony Awards. Simon splits his time between New York and Los Angeles.


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