30 PLAYS IN 30 DAYS: Play #18 "The Good Doctor" by Neil Simon

 

I have decided for the month of September to read 30 plays in 30 days. It is my belief that, if possible, a play should be read in one sitting to get a better inherent sense of the dramatic arc. Each day, I will write a short post here about the play of the day.

Play #18

The Good Doctor by Neil Simon

Neil Simon hardly needs an introduction, as he is perhaps the most prolific Broadway play hitmaker of the last eighty years or so, starting with Come Blow Your Horn in 1961. Mr. Simon died in 2018 at the age of 91, over thirty plays, 20 screenplays, and dozens of television sketches and teleplays to his credit. I can also not stress enough how every student of playwriting, or any kind of writing in general, should read his memoir Rewrites, which follows his early years of learning how to write for the stage and all the work that goes into crafting a play. His second memoir, The Play Goes On, is also a valuable look at his life, though not as heavily focused on the craft of writing. Simon won a Pulitzer for his play Lost In Yonkers, and as well as a handful of Tonys, a Golden Globe, and many other awards along the way. 

Despite some of the critical honors and his unprecedented (and never duplicated) success as an American playwright, Simon was never taken as seriously as many of his contemporaries, as though his prolific nature and the fact he was writing comedies somehow meant he was pandering to audiences, or not a craftsman worth the admiration of say, a Pinter (Pinter actually loved The Odd Couple) or a Tennessee Williams. Underestimating Simon's importance and artistry is a mistake, I think. While he had some stinkers (what writer hasn't?), the truth is, he was solid at structure, creating human characters people related to, and, as his career progressed, someone who wasn't afraid of having real pain in his comedies. Famed actress and acting teacher Uta Hagen compared his comedies to the works of Anton Chekhov.

And that's the perfect segue to talk about The Good Doctor, Neil Simon's play that is a love letter to the master, Chekhov himself. The play features "The Writer" (played by the late, great Christopher Plummer) in the original Broadway production), a stand-in for Chekhov, who talks about his love for/compulsion for writing, as he introduces sketches based on Chekhov short stories, with scenes called "The Sneeze," "The Governess", "Surgery," "Too Late For Happiness," "The Seduction," "The Drowned Man," "The Audition," "A Defenseless Creature", and "The Arrangement."  It is a bright, breezy, fun read, with Simon clearly showing much love and care to the source material and its writer, a kind of "pupil appreciation for the master" sort of piece. I can imagine audiences having a great time, so long as they don't mind watching a collection of scenes as opposed to one longer piece. I daresay this would be fun to act in as well. 

While I enjoyed reading it, it is lighter fare, even for Simon. Each scene builds to a kind of punchline and little more, and while Simon is skillful in tying them together with the character of "The Writer," the play does feel a little disjointed.  

But it is good old fashioned entertainment, nonetheless.

The Good Doctor ran for 203 performances in 1973 at the Eugene O'Neill Theater, and was nominated for Four Tonys, with Frances Sternhagen winning one for Best Featured Actress in a play.