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Neil Simon not only wrote that scene at the heart of his new play, Broadway Bound, which opened on Broadway last week, he also lived its essence. Sometimes when his mother told the story, her partner was George Raft, sometimes it was George Burns. "I heard it twisted around so many ways," he says. "It could have been Rudolph Valentino." Nonetheless, the poignant sweetness of her recollections and the faintly acrid aftertaste of his own uneasy detachment flavored Simon's adolescence. As he rose during adulthood from deprivation to celebrity, creating hit TV shows, then dozens of gag-laden Broadway...
Perhaps the most dramatic instance of rewriting in Simon's entire career is the scene of mother and son dancing in Broadway Bound. There was no hint of it in the original version. Instead there was a scene between Eugene and his girlfriend Josie, a character intended to represent Simon's first wife. Early in rehearsals it became apparent the scene was not working. "I realized it was in the wrong play," says Simon. "Some other time I will write about Joan. She needs a whole play to herself. Right then I had the idea of a scene between Eugene...
...Simon is back on Broadway, where he is the only living playwright to have had a theater named for him. He rounds out his autobiographical trilogy with Broadway Bound, a tough and unsettling recollection of the breakup of his parents' marriage and of how he walked out on that wreckage to launch his own career. The play's central image, its emotional climax, is that long-contemplated connection of mother and son, talking and dancing and?for just a moment?spiritually touching. "Until I wrote it," says Simon, "I had not fully resolved how I truly felt about my mother...
...Broadway Bound plainly means something very special, and not altogether comfortable, to Simon. At the opening night of the preview run in Washington, he collapsed with what appeared to be a heart attack. The seizure was later diagnosed as a gastric disturbance and a bad case of jitters. Says he: "This was the easiest play of mine to write but the most difficult to watch...
...where it is, he will reply, 'Not good enough.' He still has a wonderful humility about his work and has about 150 first acts in his trunk." Simon's motivation seems not to be glory either. He is intensely private, says one of his best friends, Broadway Bound Producer Emanuel Azenberg: "Although he is very diligent during the rehearsing and rewriting, when we open the shows to the public, his interest diminishes precipitously." Simon himself says, "I like the work, I like the opportunity for control over my life, but I don't like being Neil Simon the public figure...