THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 30, 1996 TAG: 9610300058
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY WENDY GROSSMAN, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 73 lines
NEIL SIMON strives to make an audience laugh and then cry in three seconds.
In his memoir, ``Rewrites,'' the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright reverses the process, showing the tears behind the laughter in his many well-known plays.
Much of the book's content is familiar, because a lot of Simon's work is autobiographical. But ``Rewrites'' also tells of the sadness that he never wrote about.
Simon, 69, got his start writing comedy sketches with his big brother, Danny. The two worked for Sid Caesar's TV show in the '50s until Neil took a job in Hollywood writing for comedian Jerry Lewis.
Simon broke into theater with his first play, ``Come Blow Your Horn,'' which took three years and 20 drafts to write.
Rewrites. Rewrites. Rewrites.
Simon, creator of ``The Odd Couple,'' ``Barefoot in the Park,'' ``Plaza Suite'' and many other serious comedies, tells just what he was thinking, feeling and doing when he wrote each play. He scribbled his ideas in the back row at rehearsals, on the beach in Jamaica, in his New York office. Anywhere. Everywhere.
In ``Rewrites,'' he doesn't leave any of the rewriting out.
At first it was really neat to sit beside a nerve-racked Simon, straining to hear giggles as the producer leafed through the first script. But the more plays he wrote, the more the producers, the actors and the playwright himself laughed - and the less I did.
It gets a little tedious to go through what every single critic from every single newspaper said about every one of Simon's plays. If it's a good review, that's nice. If it's bad, Simon defends the script.
I started skimming.
The first half of ``Rewrites'' whips by. Every sentence is a perfect joke. But the second half slows down because Simon stops showing funny little scenes and starts just telling us what happened. Like a travel log.
There's a lot of vulnerability. And an awful lot of cliched psychobabble he got from his therapist that might have been novel and interesting 20 years ago, but not now.
The second half of the book is a memorial to his first wife, Joan, who died of cancer. He wants to show the world how much he loved her. How she suffered, but still smiled. And just how great she was.
But, instead of showing us Joan, the passionate, quirky, inventive woman who appears earlier in the book, we get Neil's snippets: Joan was happy here. This is my favorite picture of Joan. Joan did this. Joan did that. Joan was great. I love Joan. I want to make Joan happy. I didn't want Joan to die. Joan did die.
Book ends.
``Rewrites'' gives Simon a chance to tell the world the pain he felt but couldn't share. Here he tells some of the stories that weren't funny.
But he doesn't talk about the plays that bombed. Nor does he talk about the one that won the Pulitzer Prize, ``Lost in Yonkers.'' He doesn't talk about his other two marriages, or his other wives at all.
Instead, he spends a lot of time gossiping, saying this actor was good, this choreographer was a saint, this director a godsend.
Maybe he should have written two books. The first on how to get started writing comedy, and the second on how he dealt with losing the love of his life. How it felt when the tears didn't lead to laughter. And he couldn't rewrite the scene. ILLUSTRATION: Photo by GREGORY HEISLER
``Rewrites'' gives Neil Simon a chance to share his pain.
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BOOK REVIEW
``Rewrites''
Author: Neil Simon
Publisher: Simon & Schuster. 381 pp.
Price: $25. by CNB