Simon, Neil (1927—)
Since the early 1960s, Broadway has almost never been without a Neil Simon hit play, which has earned the prolific New Yorker the title of the world's most commercial...
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Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Neil Simon (born 1927) has become America's most prolific and popular dramatist. His tragicomic plays expose human frailties and make people laugh at themselves.One o...
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"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 wa...
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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 audience...
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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 B...
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Critical Essay by Clifford A. Ridley
“Neil Simon, Boffmeister,” in The National Observer, Vol. 10, No. 46, November 20, 1971, p. 24.
In the following essay, Ridley observes that in The P...
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Critical Essay by Helen McMahon
“A Rhetoric of American Popular Drama: The Comedies of Neil Simon,” in Players Magazine, Vol. 51, No. 1, October, 1975, pp. 11-15.
In the following essay,...
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Critical Essay by Robert K. Johnson
Neil Simon, Twayne Publishers, 1983, pp. 16-22, 34-42, 43-51.
In the following excerpts, Johnson argues that the third act of The Odd Couple, is flawed because Simo...
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Critical Essay by Brendan Gill
I begin to perceive that I may have been unfair to Neil Simon in pursuing over the years a theory about him which has been, after all, entirely inside my head and not hi...
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Critical Essay by John Simon
When will playwrights learn that it takes more than a string of funny lines to make a comedy? Actually, Neil Simon's The Gingerbread Lady purports to be more than a...
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Critical Essay by Julius Novick
[Simon delightedly immerses] himself in the minutiae of modern American upper-middle-class existence, which no one conveys with more authority—or, anyhow, more a...
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Critical Essay by Howard Kissel
In many ways Neil Simon's "I Ought to Be in Pictures" … is a fantasy play. It presumes that a daughter who was abandoned by her father at th...
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Critical Essay by Jack Kroll
Everybody has to make a separate peace with Neil Simon. Mine came when I decided he was really an abstract artist who used gags the way Mondrian used little cells of color...
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Critical Essay by Clive Barnes
To say that I am at a loss for words is merely to put a cliche where my heart should be.
But I truly am at a loss for words. I probably admire Neil Simon more than most ...
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Critical Essay by Jack Kroll
"Fools" is Neil Simon's nineteenth play in twenty years—and his weakest. It's a fable about a Ukrainian village whose inhabitants are un...
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Critical Essay by Robert K. Johnson
Simon's mature theater work combines comedy with moments of poignance and insight. Examples abound. In The Odd Couple, Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar, althoug...
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Critical Essay by Gerald M. Berkowitz
Neil Simon is a critical embarrassment. It is bad enough that he is commercially the most successful dramatic writer of the past decade, but to make matters worse...
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Critical Essay by Douglas Watt
Is Neil Simon going soft? Or is the prodigiously industrious playwright tapped out? One hopes not, but his latest effort, "I Ought to Be in Pictures," an o...
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Simon, Neil (1927—)
Neil Simon
Neil Simon
(Marvin) Neil Simon
