Rassegna stampa di Neil Simon

NEIL SIMON is nervous. For all the success of his 82 years — a Pulitzer Prize for drama, three Tony Awards, many commercial hits on Broadway — a part of him still judges his self-worth by how much audiences laugh during his plays. Now the most personal of his works, the autobiographical “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and “Broadway Bound,” are being revived in repertory on Broadway for the first time since the original productions ran for a total of five years during the 1980s. And they are being directed by David Cromer, whose minimalist Off Broadway mounting of “Our Town” makes clear that he is not in this business for the yuks.
Mr. Simon sat silently in the “Brighton Beach” rehearsal room in August and September. (“Broadway Bound” is now in rehearsals and is scheduled to begin previews on Nov. 18.) Laurie Metcalf, who plays the mother, Kate Jerome, in both plays, recalled that Mr. Simon would watch from his rickety wooden chair as Mr. Cromer and the cast explored the darker corners of the Jerome family’s struggles with love, dreams and the Great Depression. Far from reducing the play to its jokes and sentimentality — touches that many critics and audiences associate Mr. Simon with — this “Brighton Beach” creative team is seeking to plumb deeper waters, even pathos.
“I know for a fact that this revival has been a kind of torture for Neil because he’s so close to this play and feels strongly about what the end result of it should be,” said Ms. Metcalf, who won three Emmys as Jackie, the title character’s sister on “Roseanne,” and was most recently on Broadway last year in David Mamet’s “November.”

“He’s been so patient watching us slowly, slowly trying to find our way with not only the humor but also the intense emotions of the play,” she added.
Mr. Simon admitted during a recent interview to some anxiety about what modern audiences will think of his work. There was a time when he would write a play and every theater owner on Broadway was on his knees. His “Barefoot in the Park,” “The Odd Couple” and “Plaza Suite” were among the biggest hits of the 1960s, followed the next decade by “The Sunshine Boys” and “Chapter Two,” then the three autobiographical plays in the ’80s (with “Biloxi Blues,” a Tony winner for best play, coming in between the other two). But it has been almost 17 years since his last commercial and critical success, the Pulitzer-winning “Lost in Yonkers,” closed on Broadway.
“I have to keep some distance from the work on these revivals, or otherwise I’d be saying, ‘No, no, no, no, no, you don’t have it right,’ ” Mr. Simon said as he sat on a couch in the 31st floor Midtown apartment that he uses as an office. “These folks have to do what they have to do. I liked what I watched them doing, but I didn’t want to interfere, because you’d go crazy if you did.”
Mr. Simon’s attachment to “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and “Broadway Bound” comes naturally. The sons of the Jerome family, Eugene and Stanley, are stand-ins for Mr. Simon and his brother, Danny; in both the plays and real life the brothers became a comedy-writing team. (The Simons wrote for Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows.”) But in “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and to a lesser extent in “Broadway Bound,” the father, Jack, is a far more loving version of Mr. Simon’s father, Irving, who frequently abandoned the family and was unfaithful to his wife, Mamie (Kate in the plays). The Jeromes have the sort of marriage in “Brighton Beach” that Mr. Simon said he wished his parents had.
The plays also marked a turnaround in Mr. Simon’s life. In one of his memoirs, “The Play Goes On,” he wrote about how, after a succession of flops in the early 1980s, he wondered “if my playwriting career truly was over.” He compared himself to Job and bemoaned whether “God was testing me or just bored with me.” Then one afternoon, “out of sheer desperation,” he wrote, he riffled though his desk drawers and found 35 pages of a script titled “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” written nine years earlier.
“I was smart, not having thrown it out,” he said in the interview. “I don’t know where I was living at the time, but I was on a bed, and I just started writing again.”
Bill Evans, his press agent from 1976 to 2006, said part of the thrill for Mr. Simon at the time was creating drama that was different from many of the pure comedies that had come before.
“There was a certain kind of Neil Simon show that people had come to expect, but now he was exploring territory that he hadn’t mined before,” Mr. Evans said. “These plays allowed for real human feelings. In the older works people didn’t feel that was what the characters were exploring.”
A desire to delve into the serious side of the Jerome family, in both the painful and mundane moments of the plays, led Mr. Simon and his longtime producer, Emanuel Azenberg, to agree on Mr. Cromer as the director. Known for intimate, understated work, Mr. Cromer is not the first person you’d imagine directing a Neil Simon play. But he said that Mr. Simon underscored to him that “Brighton Beach” was not meant to be a sunny play.
“He talked a lot about making sure the play was tough, and he said he wanted us to make sure that these characters were clearly, obviously poor,” Mr. Cromer said. “For the Jeromes of the ’30s, like many Americans today, there was financial loss and a world on the edge of war, and these things were dangerous and can cause anger in people. He wasn’t trying to tell me to direct a Clifford Odets play, but he didn’t want it to be cute.”
The comedian Joan Rivers, who played Kate in “Broadway Bound” toward the end of its original run, echoed Mr. Cromer in describing Mr. Simon’s comic sensibility. She compared him to Woody Allen and Larry David (of HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm”), saying there was a blend of yearning and sadness in their work that is often obscured by laughter. And while both she and Mr. Simon may be more comfortable when people are laughing, Ms. Rivers added, their stories come from experience.
“Neil knows from hard times, and he has always seen the tragedy in life,” Ms. Rivers said. “I bet Broadway audiences will be surprised by how much they relate to the pure feeling in these plays.”
Mr. Simon said that in the autobiographical plays, “I was never looking to write funny, but what I was writing about — the characters’ attitudes and situations — were funny to me.” He did express some nervousness during rehearsals and early previews that some of the humor of “Brighton Beach” wasn’t hitting quite the way he thought it should, though he was by all accounts hardly the hands-on writer that had alienated past performers like Mary Tyler Moore, who quit a 2003 Off Broadway production of Mr. Simon’s play “Rose’s Dilemma” after he wrote to her complaining that she had not learned her lines.
One reason for that change, Mr. Simon said, is his trust in Mr. Cromer. But another reason, friends and associates of Mr. Simon say, is that he has less fight in him.
Earlier this decade Mr. Simon became ill and increasingly forgetful as a result of kidney problems; in 2004 he received a kidney from Mr. Evans, his press agent and friend. His physical health improved, but his memory was at times uneven, and it continues to be worse some days than others. During the interview in his office Mr. Simon had a couple of lapses on the names of his old plays, but he shared anecdotes about his parents and his life in the theater and gave his own laudatory review of the new musical “Next to Normal,” which he has seen twice.
As for new work, Mr. Simon said, “I recently wrote about 10 pages of a new play, but I thought: ‘Do you want to get into this? Do you want to go all the way through it?’ I’m 82 years old, geez. But the truth is, I don’t know how else I’d spend my time. I’ll always love watching the Yankees, but there’s really nothing else for me like writing.”
Da The New York Times, 25 Ottobre 2009