On Monday November 20, many playwrights sat in front of their televisions laughing with inspiration as they watched the PBS telecast of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. The honoree was the prolific Neil Simon, the only playwright to have four Broadway productions running simultaneously. However, more than one unknown writer might be wondering how, in 2006, he or she might ever achieve such great success.
The recipient of three Tony Awards as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Lost in Yonkers, Simon holds the distinction of possessing more Tony Award and Academy Award nominations than any other writer in history.
But success was not instantaneous even for he. Like most fledgling writers, he met with repeated rejection early in his career. Twenty producers turned down his first play, Come Blow Your Horn. Eventually, however, it was produced in summer stock, and from there it swiftly proceeded to Broadway, where it became a big hit.
In a recent interview Simon said he performed 25 complete rewrites on that first play, and it took him three years to complete. “I just didn’t have any time to do anything else,” he says. “I did a rewrite every day. It started with little minor things but then I started getting very particular about everything so I would rewrite everything, every line, just so I could make it different. But it kept getting better, I thought, then when it got on stage and saw what the actors were doing I’d say, ‘Wait!’ And I’d make changes there and give it to them on the spot.
Robert Redford, who starred in the Broadway and film versions of Barefoot in the Park, agrees. “Neil wrote his brains out.” he says. “[He] took out pages on the spot. If something didn’t work for him, it was gone.”
According to some, the secret to Simon’s work is his dissatisfaction with it. When he was the lone writer on a Jerry Lewis comedy show, Lewis was amazed by Simon’s willingness to rewrite. “You’re the first writer I ever worked with who wanted to cut,” Lewis told him.
“Why not?” Simon said. “If it’s not going to work, take it out.”
Simon’s comic voice was shaped in the early years during his time on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, the first-of-its-kind comedy-variety series of the 1950s that was the creative playpen for Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart, Mel Tolkin, Carl Reiner, and Lucille Kallen.
“I knew, when I walked into Your Show of Shows,” American Masters quotes Simon, “that this was the most talented group of writers that up until that time had ever been assembled together.”
But even while celebrating the unparalleled accomplishments of this great writer, many contemporary young playwrights are, perhaps, wondering how they, too, might achieve such success. Could a Neil Simon emerge today?
Perhaps the more apt question is where would they emerge. Many playwrights bemoan a lack of practicable platforms to test their chops, without fear of critical backlash that could stunt a career before it starts. Gone are the auspices of Your Show of Shows. And Broadway’s so-called Golden Age — a time when a theatergoer could see Ethel Merman one night and a new Simon comedy the next, with over 60 shows running on The Great White Way — is altogether less golden.
This past August there was only one non-musical play running on Broadway. The wildly successful John Patrick Shanley drama Doubt had just closed and only the indomitable British import The History Boys remained.
Given that the late Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson had difficulty finding New York producers for his drama King Hedley II, and that once on Broadway it lasted only two months, one suspects Simon himself might have trouble in 2006, irrespective of his CV.
“Even regional theaters are reticent to mount plays by new playwrights,” says one writer. “So much is staked on whether or not a piece will sell tickets, which is understandable. Producers have to pay their bills, too. But the result is that far fewer works are being produced by unknown playwrights who in many cases are every bit as good as established writers.”
And even if a writer was able to churn out one quality drama after another, as Simon was, productions no longer seem to happen as swiftly, as evidenced by Kevin McCollum’s acceptance speech during last season’s Drama Desk Awards. While thanking fellow producer Roy Miller for passing along the script of the winning musical The Drowsy Chaperone, he apologized for “taking a year and a half to read it.”
Yet, somehow, new works are produced — even if it is in smaller numbers and at a slower rate, and playwrights keep writing. Says Keith Powell, the young producing Artistic Director of Delaware’s Contemporary Stage Company (and simultaneous star of NBC sitcom 30 Rock, “You have the power, especially in the theatre, to form your own career. Will you get paid is another story.”
As the laughter fades, and Simon takes home his ‘Twain’, playwrights across the country will continue to write, hoping their words might one day be spoken on a stage somewhere, paid or otherwise.
