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It isn’t about money or awards with Neil Simon. Other 79-year-olds might hit the golf course or visit the local coffee shop for a morning kibitz. Simon pulls out his pens and notebooks and starts to noodle the newest idea in his amazing mind. Or he sits at his typewriter (no computer for this dinosaur) and rewrites yesterday’s scribbles.
He took a moment recently to speak from his Manhattan office, where he is readying his latest work, “Waiting for Poppa.” The show was scheduled to open at the Coconut Grove in Miami, but the venerable playhouse went out of business, so Simon is looking for a new venue.
On Oct. 15, he will receive the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. The man who gave us “The Odd Couple,” “Barefoot in the Park,” “The Sunshine Boys” and countless other plays in the past half-century talked about the difficulty of working on Broadway and what piques his curiosity as he approaches his ninth decade.
Q. If you were to fly in from Mars and spend a week on Broadway, you’d have a skewed vision of theater, wouldn’t you?
A. Yeah. It’s very different. Broadway is hard now because there are fewer and fewer straight houses. It’s all musicals. Audiences seem to want musicals. Maybe the plays that have been coming in aren’t good enough, although there are those occasionally. It’s all about money. You make more money from a big hit musical.
Q. Does that make regional theaters more important in developing new work?
A. Maybe, but I don’t feel like going away from here for six weeks to do a play. But I guess that’s what I’m going to have to do. That’s why I’m trying to find the right place.
Q. Do you feel you’re still learning as a playwright?
A. I do, because you’re dealing with a different problem, a different story, different kinds of plays every time. I’m always learning in that way. Not about playwriting, because I hope when I’m writing a play and I see something that’s not working that I can fix it instead of waiting to get it in front of an audience. It’s late for that.
Q. You get up in the morning and write?
A. Some days. I’ve been doing it for so many years. It’s my life and I just keep doing it.
Q. Does critical reaction bother you?
A. No, it’s not that it doesn’t bother me, I do learn from it, if I read it and say, “That’s right, I should have done that.” It’s good when that happens and you can fix something before it gets into town. I did a play called “The Gingerbread Lady” and the producer wanted to close it in Boston. I suddenly knew what was wrong when I saw the reviews and I said just leave it open a week and let me fix it. And I rewrote like crazy and got it good enough to keep the play going and then I was able to work a lot and fix it up before we got to New York. It was never a huge hit but I thought it was a good play and should be saved.
Q. “Lost in Yonkers” is the first time you’ve been produced at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. When it was announced, some people criticized the theater as going too middlebrow.
A. Did they know the play? Or was it just me?
Q. It was you. Does that frustrate you?
A. I didn’t know that had happened, so now that you tell me that, it doesn’t frustrate me - it’s annoying. Each place likes to think their place is the best in America. So they want to keep the priorities right. I have nothing to say about that. (The Guthrie) asked me if I would let them do it and I said sure. I think it’s a good play.
Q. Some say it’s your masterpiece.
A. Well, it won the Pulitzer Prize. It’s got to be kind of good, I think.
Q. “Sweet Charity” (which Simon wrote the book for) launched its revival in Minneapolis. Did you get involved with that?
A. The fourth revival. That either means it’s really good or we’ve done it too much. I didn’t have that much to say about it because there was another director who took over and wanted to make his own changes and the guy who produced it let him do it. I was in on it from the beginning with Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon and that’s the version I like best.
Q. How do you write, by typewriter, word processor?
A. I have a big problem with that because my back, after all these years, 50 years over a typewriter, is so bad. I write it longhand. Then, with the things I wrote in longhand, the next morning I will type out.
Q. Do you have a typist?
A. Every typist I ever had gives it back to me with all the mistakes in it. And sometimes I don’t want someone else to do it because as I’m typing, I realize I want to change that right then and there.
Q. So every time you touch it, you rewrite it.
A. I know. I wish I could do it on the machine. I don’t use a computer. I use my old typewriter, like Woody Allen does.
Q. You and Woody are very different and yet similar?
A. Yeah, we are. I couldn’t explain it, but we are. You must remember that three-quarters of the movies he’s done, he’s in it. So there’s the big difference. I never write for myself. There’s a character who’s pretty close to me but Woody is Woody all the time.
Q. What are you curious about today, different things than, say, 30 years ago?
A. Yes, but I don’t write about them. I’m curious about the world today. It’s a world that for people like me and my age can’t understand at all. And I’m sure the people who are not my age can’t understand it. I don’t know where it’s going and what’s going to happen. But I’m not the kind of writer who writes that well. And I don’t know how much impact a playwright is going to make on that subject.
Q. What do you like?
A. I liked “Jersey Boys,” I liked the watchamacallit, “History Boys,” I was gonna say “Sunshine Boys.” There are a lot of good shows. Sometimes I get so discouraged by what I see, because of the taste of some of the people. How they perceive life as it is today as so different than I do. Not that I’m old-fashioned; some of them I just don’t get. And when something is good, I just love it.
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© 2006 Star Tribune (Minneapolis) Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
