February 22: Neil Simon made his Broadway debut fifty years ago today, when Come Blow Your Horn opened for a
twenty-month run. The play's success allowed Simon to escape the day job he
loathed, writing comedy for the "Red Buttons Show," the "Sgt.
Bilko Show," and other television hits. In Rewrites, his first book of memoirs, Simon describes his birth
pains with his first play—over two-and-a-half years he did twenty-two complete
revisions—as an against-all-odds comedy. But the opening night audience laughed,
the reviews were acceptable to good, and Simon thought he was on his way, until
he showed up at the box office the next morning to see how long the line of
ticket-buyers was and saw, instead, the play's closing notice posted.
Then somebody coaxed the producers
into a gamble: hand out free tickets on the street corners, pack the house, and
hope for the word-of-mouth to sweep through the city. In the end, the show was
saved only because both Noel Coward and Groucho Marx saw it, both of them
afterwards praising the play within earshot of the gossip columnists.
Looking back, Simon says
that the play "seems like the crude markings in a cave by the first
prehistoric chronicler," but it was a key moment in the development of his
craft. The following, from a 1992 Paris
Review interview on "The Art of the Theater," is Simon's response
to a question on his writing methods:
I've always felt like a
middleman, like the typist. Somebody somewhere else is saying, "This is
what they say now. This is what they say next." Very often it is the
characters themselves, once they become clearly defined. When I was working on
my first play, Come Blow Your Horn, I
was told by fellow writers that you must outline your play, you must know where
you're going. I wrote a complete, detailed outline from page one to the end of
the play. In the writing of the play, I didn't get past page fifteen when the
characters started to move away from the outline. I tried to pull them back in,
saying, "Get back in there. This is where you belong. I've already
diagrammed your life." They said, "No, no, no. This is where I want
to go . . . ."
Daybook is contributed by Steve King, who teaches in the English Department of Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. His literary daybook began as a radio series syndicated nationally in Canada. He can be found online at todayinliterature.com.
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