The Play Goes On: A Memoir [Paperback]

Neil Simon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2, 2002

In his critically acclaimed Rewrites, Neil Simon talked about his beginnings -- his early years of working in television, his first real love, his first play, his first brush with failure, and, most moving of all, his first great loss. Simon's same willingness to open his heart to the reader permeates The Play Goes On.

This second act takes the reader from the mid-1970s to the present, a period in which Simon wrote some of his most popular and critically acclaimed plays, including the Brighton Beach trilogy and Lost in Yonkers, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Simon experienced enormous professional success during this time, but in his personal life he struggled to find that same sense of happiness and satisfaction. After the death of his first wife, he and his two young daughters left New York for Hollywood. There he remarried, and when that foundered he remarried again. Told with his characteristic humor and unflinching sense of irony, The Play Goes On is rich with stories of how Simon's art came to imitate his life.

Simon's forty-plus plays make up a body of work that is a long-running memoir in its own right, yet here, in a deeper and more personal book than his first volume, Simon offers a revealing look at an artist in crisis but still able and willing to laugh at himself.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Despite its somber opening on the day in 1973 just after he buried his wife, Joan, this second volume of Neil Simon's memoirs is frequently as funny as his plays. The real estate agent who shows him and second wife Marsha Mason around Los Angeles reminds him so much of Sunset Boulevard's Norma Desmond, he remarks, "I immediately started looking around the car for the dead monkey." When he phones his brother and says, "Danny, I just won the Pulitzer Prize" (for Lost in Yonkers), Danny's response is, "Wait a second, I have to stop the water in my bath." If Simon harbored any malice, some of his wry barbs might really sting. Instead, he's gentlemanly and uncontrite about the failure of his marriage to Mason ("it takes two to untangle," he opines), and even more reticent about his relationship with wife number 3 who was also number 4, which didn't work out either time. Writing plays like Brighton Beach Memoirs and Broadway Bound sparks more enthusiastic prose, and Simon's gushing about his three daughters is done in a manner so corny it's positively endearing. For a man who believes he became successful "by feeding off my own insecurities and sharing them with a world of people," Simon, at age 71, seems pretty well-adjusted. --Wendy Smith --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Simon begins his hauntingly sad yet often quite funny second memoir (following his 1996 Rewrites) in 1973, on the day after the burial of his first wife, who died of cancer. Things look bad at first, as the massively successful American playwright (he's won the Pulitzer Prize and three Tony awards, and written 40 plays and almost as many original and adapted screenplays) can't even get out of bed. It thus comes as a great relief, if also something of a surprise, when Simon meets and marries actress Marsha Mason three months later. In Mason, Simon finds not only an outstanding interpreter of his words (Goodbye Girl, Only When I Laugh), but also an inspiration (Chapter Two, a play about a widower's second marriage). When his relationship with Mason collapses nine years later, Simon plunges back into a depression that is exacerbated by his first-ever career slump. Eventually, he applies a combination of innovative personal therapies (he spends a lot of time with his dog and shoots a pistol into his swimming pool) and professional luck (he stumbles over a draft of the eventual megahit Brighton Beach Memoirs that he had penned several years before) and claws his way out of his slump. His greatest successes still lay ahead (along with another marriageAand divorce and remarriage) in the form of his BB trilogy (Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound), featuring his alter ego Eugene Jerome. Simon says that a memoir should serve two functions: "to pass on as much as you're willing to tell" and "to discover a truth about yourself you never had the time or courage to face before." A superb and introspective raconteur, he achieves both goals many times over in this exhilarating book. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First Edition edition (April 2, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684869802
• ISBN-13: 978-0684869803
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,354,164 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Disappointing Follow-On to "Rewrites", April 14, 2000

By 

Bob Koch (Norcross, Georgia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Play Goes On: A Memoir (Hardcover)

I was anxious to see the arrival of "The Play Goes On" as I had really enjoyed "Rewrites", but felt as though Simon had more to say, but hadn't been able to get to it in the first of this biographical series. However, this latest lacked the humor of "Rewrites" and I felt myself without much incentive to keep turning pages other than to get some insights to some of his lesser-known works.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Honest, Funny and Insightful, October 18, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Play Goes On: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Neil Simon, aside from being a prolific playwright, is also a fascinating subject for a memoir. In this, his second, Mr. Simon not only entertains us all over again with his unique style of relating painfully funny stories, but goes beyond the humor to give us a glimpse of the underlying emotions. I think it's a very brave and generous man who can share this sort of memoir. Rather than sit back and say, "I've written umpteen million plays, made a fortune and had a rocky road through the death of a spouse and two divorces," Mr. Simon puts aside the jokes for a while and examines what made the road so rocky and why writing became his protective shell. Let's hope he's around a lot longer to bring us newer, funnier and even more heartfelt plays as a result of making himself take this personal journey of discovery.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Take it for what it is, January 3, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Play Goes On: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Neil Simon is best studied by reading and seeing interpretations of his plays, but since this book is an autobiography, it is interesting at the very least for seeing what the man's own perspective on his life has been. There are definitely some moments that appear repetitive and unnecessary, but as he says in the book, Mr. Simon was not keeping notes throughout his life with the knowledge that he would someday write a book. That means he and we are forced to rely on his memories and notions when they occur to him, which is why some of the book is out of sequence. I would have loved to have seen more insights into the plays and screenplays themselves, especially since he completely neglects to mention "Laughter On The 23rd Floor", which I saw twice on Broadway and laughed harder the second time than the first. He alludes to it once, but never says anything regarding the production even though he spends at least a few pages on some of his less-successful works. However, it's those exact pages on the lesser known stuff like "The Good Doctor", "Rumors", and "Jake's Women" that are so interesting.

Generally, I find it difficult to read biographies of people who are still with us, for the simple fact that that story can never be complete. One of the good things about the first volume of autobiography, Rewrites, was that it ended at a specific point in time with the death of Mr. Simon's first wife which represented the "end" of a chapter in his life and therefore lent itself to being presented as a complete story. I was impressed at how up to date The Play Goes On was, but how can even this be the definitive story of Neil Simon and his work unless he retires? Surely (and hopefully) Neil Simon has many more years and several plays ahead of him, so maybe he's just leaving open the option of doing a third book.