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...

3333 Broadway, between 133rd and 135th Sts., as seen from Google Earth Sounds positively suburban next to the density envisioned by Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn (below): between 436,363 and 523,636 inhabitants per square mile (based on estimated population of between 15,000 and 18,000 residents...

Ever since Peter Falk lit the opening cigarette in the 1971 Broadway version of The Prisoner of Second Avenue, the eastern reaches of the Upper East Side have been known as a haven—or hell—for modest renters. The real-estate boom has changed all of that, prompting...

Ever since Peter Falk lit the opening cigarette in the 1971 Broadway version of The Prisoner of Second Avenue, the eastern reaches of the Upper East Side have been known as a haven—or hell—for modest renters. The real-estate boom has changed all of that, prompting...

As The Prisoner of Second Avenue begins to unfold, it's clear that Mel Edison … is your prototypical middle-class New Yorker. A 46-year-old account executive who has lived six years in his 14th floor apartment …, he is beset by all the existential woes of the urban condition…. Mel Edison, in brief, is quite literally losing his sanity; and in establishing this condition, Neil Simon has done his best work to date…. If it is not a wholly successful play, it is a wholly admir...

["The Prisoner of Second Avenue"] is a comedy about the breakdown of the system in New York. Superficially, it is similar to Simon's screenplay, "The Out-of-Towners," though the main events in the movie—the rapes, the muggings, the burglaries, the endless strikes—are just the background for the play. (In the play, they are described through the deadly technique of a television news announcer in the dark between scenes.) The foreground of the play shows the br...

[Neil Simon's "The Prisoner of Second Avenue"] is full of the humor and intelligence characteristic of this brilliant comic playwright…. Here he is wryly contemplating the misfortune of a Manhattan family. The husband has lost his job, is fighting pollution and his neighbors, and faces the problems of living in a violent city. In fact, he is about to undergo a nervous breakdown. His wise and understanding wife is for a while the pillar of the family, but, after her job has gone a...