Neil Simon

Full Length, Comedy Characters: 2 male, 3 female Interior set Neil Simon at his most humane, compassionate best. It's a humorous confection divided into four parts: Visitor from New York, Visitor from Philadelphia, Visitors from London and Visitors from Chicago. In Visitor from New York, Hannah, a magazine writer is joined by her ex-husband, the question being with whom should their daughter spend the next six months? The badinage flies fa

Comedy / Characters: 3 male, 3 femaleScenery: InteriorAmerica's premier comic playwright crosses the Atlantic for a suite of hilarious comedies set in a deluxe London hotel a sedate place until these characters check in. In Settling Accounts, the suite is occupied by an inebriated Welsh writer who is holding his long time business manager, caught absconding with the writer's money, at gun point. The villian concocts increasingly farfetched explanations of what he was doing at Heathrow with

Comedy / Characters: 3 male 3 femaleScenery: InteriorHere is a decidedly French dinner party served up in a chaotic mode that only a master of comedy could create. Five people are invited to dine at a first rate restaurant in Paris. They do not know who the other guests will be or why they have been invited. Tossed together in a private dining room they have a sneaking suspicion that this unorthodox dinner party will forever change their lives. John Ritter and Henry Winkler starred in th

Comedy / Characters: 2 males, 4 females Scenery: Interior Mel Edison is a well paid executive of a high-end Manhattan firm which has suddenly hit the skids and he gets the ax. His wife Edna takes a job to tide them over, then she too is sacked. Compounded by the air-pollution killing his plants, and with the walls of the apartment paper-thin, allowing him a constant earfull of his neighbors private lives things can't seem to get any worse...then he's robbed and his psychiatrist dies with $

Full Length, Comedy / Characters: 3 male, 4 female Scenery: Interior Neil Simon's first Broadway comedy smash. Alan Baker, a 30-ish swinging bachelor with time, money and women to spare, welcomes rebellious and eager 21-year brother Buddy into his den of iniquity while their horrified parents can only watch and pray. This farcical 60's romp became a hit movie starring Frank Sinatra. "A slick, lively, funny comedy."-The New York Times

Comedy / Casting: 2m, 3f / Scenery: Var. settings This Broadway hit is a composite of Neil Simon and Anton Chekhov. In one sketch a harridan storms a bank and upbraids the manager for his gout and lack of money. In another, a father takes his son to a house where he will be initiated into the mysteries of sex, only to relent at the last moment and leave the boy more perplexed than ever. In another sketch, a crafty seducer goes to work on a wedded woman, only to realize that the woman has bee

Full Length, Comedy / 5m, 2f / Scenery: Interior Al and Willie as "Lewis and Clark" were top-billed vaudevillians for over forty years. Now they aren't even speaking. When CBS requests them for a "History of Comedy" retrospective, a grudging reunion brings the two back together, along with a flood of memories, miseries and laughs. "It's ham on wry...Simon's sure footed craftsmanship and his one liners are as exquisitely apt as ever."-New York Post "Delicious and oddly affecting."-T

Full Length, Comic Drama / Casting: 6m, 2f / Scenery: Various sets Tony Award Best Play 1985 The second in Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Neil Simon's trilogy which began with Brighton Beach Memoirs and concluded with Broadway Bound. When we last met Eugene Jerome, he was coping with adolescence in 1930's Brooklyn. Here, he is a young army recruit during WW II, going through basic training and learning about Life and Love with a capital 'L' along with some harsher lessons, while station

Comedy / 7m, 5f (performed on Broadway with 3m, 2f) / Scenery: InteriorHilarity abounds in this portrait of three couples successively occupying a suite at the Plaza. A suburban couple take the suite while their house is being paintedandit turns out to be the one in which they honeymooned 23 (or was it 24?) years before and was yesterday the anniversary, or is it today? This wry tale of marriage in tatters is followed by the exploits of a Hollywood producer who, after three marriages, is look

Comic Drama / Casting: 4m 3f / Interior SceneryWinner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award By America's great comic playwright this memory play is set in a Yonkers in 1942. The hit Broadway production featured Irene Worth Mercedes Ruehl and Kevin Spacey in award-winning performances. Bella is 35-years-old mentally challenged and living at home with her mother stern Grandma Kurnitz . As the play opens ne'r do-well son Eddie deposits his two young sons on the old lady's doorstep.

Full Length, Comic Drama / 3m, 4f / Comb. Ints/Ext. Here is part one of Neil Simon's autobiographical trilogy: a portrait of the writer as a young teen in 1937 living with his family in a crowded, lower middle-class Brooklyn walk-up. Eugene Jerome, standing in for the author, is the narrator and central character. Dreaming of baseball and girls, Eugene must cope with the mundane existence of his family life in Brooklyn: formidable mother, overworked father, and his worldly older brother Stanley

Comedy / 7m 3f / Int/ext.Leon Tolchinsky is ecstatic. He's landed a terrific teaching job in an idyllic Russian hamlet. When he arrives he finds people sweeping dust from the stoops back into their houses and people milking upside down to get more cream. The town has been cursed with Chronic Stupidity for 200 years and Leon's job is to break the curse. No one tells him that if he stays over 24 hours and fails to break the curse he too becomes Stupid. But he has fallen in love with a girl so

Farce / 5m, 5f / Int. At a large, tastefully appointed Sneden's Landing townhouse, the Deputy Mayor of New York has just shot himself. Though only a flesh wound, four couples are about to experience a severe attack of Farce. Gathering for their tenth wedding anniversary, the host lies bleeding in the other room and his wife is nowhere in sight. His lawyer, Ken and wife Chris must get "the story" straight before the other guests arrive. As the confusions and mis-communications mount, the evenin

Comedy / 6m, 2f / Int. This classic comedy opens as a group of the guys assembled for cards in the apartment of divorced Oscar Madison. And if the mess is any indication, it's no wonder that his wife left him. Late to arrive is Felix Unger who has just been separated from his wife. Fastidious, depressed and none too tense, Felix seems suicidal, but as the action unfolds Oscar becomes the one with murder on his mind when the clean-freak and the slob ultimately decide to room together with hilari

Comedy / 2m, 6f / Int. Unger and Madison are at it again! Florence Unger and Olive Madison, that is, in Neil Simon's hilarious contemporary comic classic: the female version of The Odd Couple. Instead of the poker party that begins the original version, Ms. Madison has invited the girls over for an evening of Trivial Pursuit. The Pidgeon sisters have been replaced by the two Constanzuela brothers. But the hilarity remains the same. "Very funny indeed." - New York Post "Endearing." - USA Toda

Picking up where the highly praised REWRITES ended, Neil Simon presents the second act of the comedy-drama of his own life. THE PLAY GOES ON takes readers from the mid-1970s to the present, a period during which Simon wrote some of his best and most critically acclaimed plays, including THE BRIGHTON BEACH trilogy and LOST IN YONKERS, winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for drama. For many years, Simon's pleasure at achieving enormous public success was overshadowed by his personal grief over the death of his first wife. THE PLAY GOES ON opens with the new life Simon embarked on when he married actress Marcia Mason and moved to California. In his familiar style, a mixture of humour and poignancy, Simon describes his life with Mason, their eventual divorce, and his remarriages (twice) to another woman.

"Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, Plaza Suite, The Goodbye Girl, The Out-of-Towners, The Sunshine Boys" -- Neil Simon's plays and movies have kept many millions of people laughing for almost four decades. Today he is recognized not only as the most successful American playwright of all time, but also as one of the greatest. More than the humor, however, it is the humanity of Neil Simon's vision that has made him America's most beloved playwright and earned him such enduring success. Now, in "Rewrites," he has written a funny, deeply touching memoir, filled with details and anecdotes of the writing life and rich with the personal experiences that underlie his work. Since "Come Blow Your Horn" first opened on Broadway in 1960, few seasons have passed without the appearance of another of his laughter-filled plays, and indeed on numerous occasions two or more of his works have been running simultaneously. But his success was something Neil Simon never took for granted, nor was the talent to create laughter something that he ever treated carelessly: it took too long for him to achieve the kind of acceptance -- both popular and critical -- that he craved, and the path he followed frequently was pitted with hard decisions. All of Neil Simon's plays are to some extent a reflection of his life, sometimes autobiographical, other times based on the experiences of those close to him. What the reader of this warm, nostalgic memoir discovers, however, is that the plays, although grounded in Neil Simon's own experience, provide only a glimpse into the mind and soul of this very private man. In "Rewrites," he tells of the painful discord he endured at home as a child, of his struggles to develop his talent as a writer, and of his insecurities when dealing with what proved to be his first great success -- falling in love. Supporting players in the anecdote-filled memoir include Sid Caesar, Jerry Lewis, Walter Matthau, Robert Redford, Gwen Verdon, Bob Fosse, Maureen Stapleton, George C. Scott, Peter Sellers, and Mike Nichols. But always at center stage is his first love, his wife Joan, whose death in the early seventies devastated him, and whose love and inspiration illuminate this remarkable and revealing self-portrait. "Rewrites" is rich in laughter and emotion, and filled with the memories of a sometimes sweet, sometimes bittersweet life.