Chapter Two is being heralded as a deepening of Neil Simon's art. It is certainly every bit as much deepening as it is art. The play is admittedly based on Neil Simon's and Marsha Mason's courtship and marriage. George Schneider, a novelist, has lost his beloved wife from cancer; Jennie Malone is an actress who has lost a rather less beloved husband by divorce. Pimping for George is his younger brother, Leo, a theatrical agent; pimping for Jennie is her chum Faye, a queen of the soaps. Against all sorts of likelihood, George and Jennie meet, love, and marry, and start having difficulties, because George is afraid that happiness with the absolutely perfect Jennie means unfaithfulness to the memory of the absolutely perfect Barbara. Finally, though, things settle down blissfully, while Leo and Faye, both unhappily married, try their hand at some unsuccessful and ludicrous adultery. They, clearly, are intended as some sort of comic relief from the supposedly serious drama of George and Jennie, but they end up as standard Neil Simon characters making sure that the play does not get too "high" for the audience.
There's no danger of that, however. As one of the characters observes, "I have already tried transcendental meditation, health foods, and jogging, and I am now serenely, tranquilly, and more robustly as unhappy as I have ever been." I quote this for two reasons. First, because it is merely an updated version of the Horatian naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret: try to drive Neil Simon out of Neil Simon with a pitchfork, and he comes rushing right back in. But also, there is the fact that, a few days later, I can no longer remember whether it is the hero or heroine who speaks that line. The characters in Simon are interchangeable because, with minor differences, they are all Neil Simon: accumulations of wisecracks, machines that chop life down to one-liners, and humanoid contraptions, miserable for the sake of being comically miserable. This might even be all right if you did not have the feeling that the author so unabashedly adores them for being that and no more than that. (pp. 155-56)
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