Neil Simon - Characters

Characters

Simon’s characters are typically portrayed as “imperfect, unheroic figures who are at heart decent human beings,” according to Koprince, and she traces Simon’s style of comedy to that of Menander, a playwright of ancient Greece. Menander, like Simon, also used average people in domestic life settings, the stories also blending humor and tragedy into his themes. Many of Simon’s most memorable plays, notes Konas, “have been built around two-character scenes,” as in segments of California Suite and Plaza Suite.

Before writing, Simon tries to create an image of his characters. He says that the play, Star Spangled Girl which was a box-office failure, was “the only play I ever wrote where I did not have a clear visual image of the characters in my mind as I sat down at the typewriter.” Simon considers “character building” as an obligation, stating that the “trick is to do it skillfully.” Partly because of that skill, Johnson states that “other writers have created vivid characters—but not in the sheer abundance Simon has,” adding that “Simon has no peers among contemporary comedy playwrights.”

Of his characters, McGovern notes that although they are at times exaggerated for the stage, “they are usually amusing the audience with sparkling ‘zingers,” which are also “very believable” due to Simon’s “facility with dialogue. She states that “he reproduces speech so adroitly,” his characters are usually plausible and easy for audiences to identify with and laugh at.

Simon’s characters also express many “serious and continuing concerns of mankind...rather than purely topical material,” which are more transitory. She observes that his characters are always impatient “with phoniness, with shallowness, with amorality,” adding that they sometimes express “implicit and explicit criticism of modern urban life with its stress, its vacuity, and its materialism.” However, observes Johnson, “no Simon hero or heroine makes the ultimate Romantic gesture of thumbing his or her nose at society.”