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—a good Simon play was a formal construct in which the gags were in pleasing tension with one another. The subjects—odd couples, red-hot lovers, sunshine boys—were really only different ways of arranging the Mondrian gag-colors into different patterns. Since having this momentous insight into the Simon gestalt, I can enjoy his plays like any other Simon fan. As a good American. I want to be a Simon fan and this is the way that works for me. At least it did until "I Ought to Be in Pictures" came to Broadway.
This play can't be Mondrianized. It's got little gag-dabs running through it, but not nearly enough to make a true Simondrian. It looks, God help us, as if Simon MAY NOT WANT TO BE FUNNY ANYMORE! He may just want to be serious first, and funny second. But as a scholar of comedy, Simon should know that funny men can only be serious if they're funny first. At least it's got to be a dead heat, as it was in "Chapter Two," where funny and serious met on equal terms like that old Chinese vaudeville team Yin and Yang.
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