The Sparkle of Neil Simon

Long ago, when I first started reading plays, I would have said Neil Simon was my favorite playwright.  Long ago, when I first started reading plays, I read them out loud.  His work sounded the best to my 12 year old ears.

What was a 12 year old doing reading plays out loud?  Somewhere in my 12th year, I decided I wanted to be an actress when I grew up.  I decided that I would practice delivering lines, even if I wasn't in a play.  I would check books of dramas out of the library, the place where I got most of my books, and I'd read my way through them.  I'd choose a character and read those lines.  If along the way I realized I'd chosen a minor character, I'd change.  Sometimes, I'd revisit a play and read the lines out loud of a different character.

Now that I'm older, I look back on my childhood and adolescence and wonder what my parents thought of me.  I was a weird kid.  I had no interest in dating, the way that other pre-teens might have.  No, I sat in my room and read plays out loud.

I can't tell you what my favorite Neil Simon play was.  In many ways, the more I read them, the more similar they seemed.  I remember some of them more than others, vaguely, and it's probably because I saw the movie version or TV version or the TV version made of the earlier TV version, such as The Odd Couple.

As a writer, he felt important to me too.  I admired his output, often one play a year during many years, and how much of it was quality on some level.  You might say, "Well, he was no Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams."  But comic writers rarely get the kind of respect as those writers who dissect the darker elements of society.

I haven't read one of his plays or seen one of his movies in decades.  I wonder how well they hold up. I imagine that the dialog would still sparkle consistently, play after play.  That's a skill I'd love to have, the ability to capture the way that people speak and to capture it in a timeless way.  Maybe it's time to return to Simon as a writer.  Maybe he has much to teach us.