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...