Neil Simon is a master of comedy and one of the most popular dramatists in the history of the American theater. His plays, which range from light romantic comedy and farce to drama, have entertained Broadway audiences for nearly four decades and have als...

One of America's most popular and prolific playwrights is Neil Simon. Having seventeen Broadway productions to his credit, as well as screenplays and television scripts, Simon has entertained audiences for over twenty years. He has been hailed as the mos...

"When I was a kid," playwright Neil Simon tells Tom Prideaux of Life, "I climbed up on a stone ledge to watch an outdoor movie of Charlie Chaplin. I laughed so hard I fell off, cut my head open and was taken to the doctor, bleeding and laughing.... My id...

Brooklyn boy Darren Aronofsky's druggie nightmare Requiem for a Dream is all about the force of habit. It was the most depressing period in my life," Darren Aronofsky says, sitting in a coffee shop on New York's Ninth Avenue. "Several years of...

Neil Simon's "Brighton Beach Memoirs" is a wonderful combination of humor and truth. And because there is so much truth in the humor, it's much more than a simple comedy. The Fulton's production of the show, which opened Thursday night, is just about...

Whenever a writer gets around to presenting us with his own portrait of the artist as a young man, he invariably does two things. He makes his young man sensitive, very sensitive. A blossom on the vine that will wither and die unless it is promptly given succor. And he makes his young man a victim, a stranger in the household who is not going to be properly nurtured because he is so blatantly misunderstood; he must escape the obtuseness about him at all costs. You know how it goes. Now,… we have Neil...

[In the autobiographical memory play "Brighton Beach Memoirs"] Mr. Simon makes real progress toward an elusive longtime goal: he mixes comedy and drama without, for the most part, either force-feeding the jokes or milking the tears. It's happy news that one of our theater's slickest playwrights is growing beyond the well-worn formulas of his past. The other likable aspect of Mr. Simon's writing here is its openness and charity of spirit. Far more than most Simon plays, &#x...

Imagine Eugene O'Neill with a soft streak down his back. Imagine Tennessee Williams in a memory play just slightly cuter than it needed to be. This is Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs—it is effortlessly his best play yet, it is in its way the best play of the season so far, and it is strangely a slight disappointment.