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 his, and which I have therefore had no reason to grow impatient with him for failing to live up to. The awkward fact of the matter is that I have thought I could detect a certain figure in the brightly colored wall-to-wall carpet of his work, but Mr. Simon has now made it plain that the figure isn't there and never was there; moreover, he has proceeded to pull the carpet itself right out from under me…. After Mr. Simon's dazzling "Barefoot in the Park," which, though but an airy, negligible anecdote, filled a whole evening with delight, I wondered whether he wasn't going to lead comedy in a new direction—one in which a continuous free association of homely, amusing small talk would take the place of the usual carefully carpentered box of self-triggering gags and predictable sudden reversals of fortune. It was evident that Mr. Simon had what amounted to a genius for badinage, and it occurred to me that he could elevate this into an art form of his own, blessedly free of the Victorian clutter that has hobbled the comedies of most of his Broadway contemporaries. To my dismay, Mr. Simon has shown no interest in becoming a sort of Beckett of banter. His plays have grown ever more cautious and better made, which is to say more old-fashioned, and his latest hit, "Last of the Red Hot Lovers,"… is by far the most old-fashioned play in the Simon canon. With this one, he strikes me as marching straight back into the nineteenth century; it is a curious development, but I have learned my lesson, and wild horses could not drag from me a portentous generalization about it….
[Simon] holds "Last of the Red Hot Lovers" to be something new for him; he calls it a serious comedy, and I fear that he intends to display a still greater degree of seriousness in the future. It is a grave misreading of his gifts, for Mr. Simon's so-called seriousness has a banality of insight not easily to be distinguished from that of soap opera. When he tries to dramatize his no doubt deeply felt emotions in respect to old age and death, to say nothing of such abstractions as goodness and decency, he rises with difficulty to the level of a high-school essay…. Mr. Simon's clumsy grapplings with Real Life are being saluted as signs of a newfound compassion and a new breadth of vision on the part of the mature playwright. They are nothing of the sort…. "Last of the Red Hot Lovers" is a very funny play … but it is also synthetic, and compassion and breadth of vision would have been thoroughly out of place in it. (p. 64)
Brendan Gill, in The New Yorker (© 1970 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.), January 10, 1970.
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Read the rest of this Criticism with our Simon, (Marvin) Neil 1927–: Critical Essay by Brendan Gill Access Pass.
