Word: bounding
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...Broadway Bound's significance for Simon is emotional. It is his most honest, unromanticized look at where he came from, a show so powerfully evocative that both he and his brother Danny have wept openly while watching it in performance. He admits, "I feel funny about being rewarded for laying out the bones of my family and myself. Even now, I suspect I would not have written it if my parents were alive." Broadway Bound is also, in his view, his best play, the one he would like to be remembered by. His family, friends and professional associates all seem...
Neil Simon is America's foremost stage comedist, the theatrical equivalent of Woody Allen in the movies. Even in his weakest plays that gift of laughter has never faltered, and it is in full flower in his trilogy. But for all its exuberant humor, Broadway Bound is a comedy only in the sense that Chekhov meant Uncle Vanya to be seen as a comedy. Its subjects include the dissolution of two marriages, the estrangements of a father from a daughter and of another father from his sons, the terminal cancer of one offstage character and the accidental death of another...
...Broadway Bound, as in the other parts of the trilogy, Eugene speaks to the audience in asides. But here the voice in those asides is not the young man of the play explaining his inner thoughts; he is the older and wiser writer looking back and assessing the consequential forces in his life. Says Simon: "The audience listens attentively because it knows this character is going to become a very successful writer who will write the play the audience is seeing." This frank, almost naked address to the audience gives the play a startling immediacy, despite its nostalgic setting...
...audiences who come to the theater for feeling rather than anesthesia, for honesty rather than comfort, Broadway Bound should firmly establish Simon's standing in the top rank of American playwrights. He does not attempt to do what Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams and Sam Shepard have done: create their own worlds and mesmerize viewers into them. Simon evokes a world very much like the viewers' own and entices them into confronting their own feelings. Broadway Bound is the work of a master craftsman, at once literary and heartfelt, shaped with becoming modesty. It is unmistakably urban and Jewish...
...through a moody period of late, one that has made him willing to talk about his worries and insecurity in conversation and not just through his work?a pursuit that was always his "refuge" but is now satisfying him less. He says, "I wasn't feeling happy during Broadway Bound. Eugene and Stanley are shown when life is just beginning. I can't get back to that place. I would never think of giving up my career, but it's just not the same as when I began to achieve what I wanted." He concedes that his "gloom" has been...