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    Library of Congress Acquires Neil Simon Papers

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    The collection of approximately 7,700 items, donated by Simon’s widow, includes dozens of unfinished shows, including a screenplay written for Bette Midler and Whoopi Goldberg.As Mark Eden Horowitz, a senior music specialist at the Library of Congress, was digging through the playwright Neil Simon’s manuscripts and papers earlier this year, he made a surprising discovery.Simon, the most commercially successful American playwright of the 20th century, could also draw. Like, really draw.“They’re almost professional,” Horowitz said in a recent phone conversation of some of the pen-and-ink drawings and paintings he found tucked among the scripts. “There are two watercolors in particular that are quite beautiful landscapes.”More than a dozen notepads filled with drawings, cartoons and caricatures by Simon, who died in 2018, was just one of the surprising discoveries Horowitz made in the trove of approximately 7,700 of the playwright’s manuscripts and papers (and even eyeglasses), a collection that the library on Monday announced had been donated by Simon’s widow, the actress Elaine Joyce.An event on Monday at the library in Washington, which will stream live on its YouTube channel at 7 p.m., will include a conversation with the actors Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, who are starring in the Broadway revival of Simon’s 1968 comedy “Plaza Suite,” as well as remarks by Joyce.The collection includes hundreds of scripts, notes and outlines for Simon’s plays, including handwritten first drafts and multiple drafts of typescripts — often annotated — as well as handwritten letters to luminaries like August Wilson. There are more than a dozen scripts (sometimes many more) for some of his most celebrated shows, including “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” “The Odd Couple” and “Lost in Yonkers,” Simon’s dysfunctional-family comedy that won a Tony Award as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1991.Sometimes, Horowitz said, it took some detective work to identify a famous play, which existed in an early version under an alternate title. (An early script for “Lost in Yonkers” has the title “Louie the Gangster,” and “Brighton Beach Memoirs” was once “The War of the Rosens.”)“Sometimes you’re not sure when you open the title and then you realize, ‘Oh, this became that,’” he said.The collection includes materials from the 25 screenplays Simon wrote, including “The Prisoner of Second Avenue,” “The Heartbreak Kid” and “The Goodbye Girl,” for which he won a Golden Globe in 1978. There are also several scripts for shows never completed or produced, such as one titled “The Merry Widows,” written for Bette Midler and Whoopi Goldberg, and a musical that uses the songs of George and Ira Gershwin, called “A Foggy Day.”“Every time you open a carton, it’s like, ‘Oh my God, what’s going to be in here?’” Horowitz said.Beyond dozens of unknown works in progress — some comprise just a few scenes, while others have multiple drafts — the archive also includes Simon’s Pulitzer Prize, his special Tony Award and at least two Golden Globes, as well as photographs, programs, original posters and even baseballs signed by several Hall of Famers, among them Tommy Lasorda, Eddie Murray and Tony Gwynn. (Simon was a noted baseball fan.)Dozens of spiral notebooks are also packed not just with revisions and “miscellaneous attempts at plays,” as Simon wrote in one, but drafts of speeches and tributes Simon delivered. In one case, a script for a show called “202 and 204” is interrupted by handwritten letters to cast members of “Lost in Yonkers” for opening night — plus the set designer, lighting designer, even the casting director, Horowitz said.Horowitz said that, once the library finishes combing through the items and putting scripts in alphabetical order, it plans to develop a digital tool similar to the ones they have to search other collections of work by theater professionals like Simon’s close friends Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon, with whom he collaborated on the musical “Sweet Charity.”He also hopes that not just researchers, but also producers, might dive into the archives — and that some of the unproduced works might be staged, and the unfinished ones perhaps completed.“It’s so frustrating,” he said, laughing. “I desperately want to know how they end.” More

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      Review: In ‘Plaza Suite,’ the Ghosts of #MeToo Haunt the Halls

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      Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker star in a Neil Simon comedy that no longer feels very funny.The first thing you see when the curtain goes up on “Plaza Suite” is an aquatint image of that grand hotel in its antique glory. But when it comes to datedness, the faux-French pile that opened its doors in 1907 has nothing on the Neil Simon comedy — itself a faux-French pile — that debuted on Broadway in 1968. Despite the wearying efforts of a likable cast headed by Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, the passage of 54 years is more than enough to reveal the triptych of one-act plays as uninhabitable in 2022.That may be why the creative team, led by the director John Benjamin Hickey, has taken pains to set the revival, which opened on Monday at the Hudson Theater, so squarely in its period. The grand but dowdy décor of John Lee Beatty’s champagne-colored rooms, along with Jane Greenwood’s transitional costumes (sometimes mod Pucci, sometimes seamed stockings) and Marc Shaiman’s groovy interstitial pop, put a velvet rope around the action to mark it off as a museum piece.But it would need something more like a cordon sanitaire to protect the audience from the trickle of smarm that leaks from the play. Structurally it barely stands, the three stories joined only by the setting they share — Suite 719 — and the two stars playing the leads in each. Beyond that, if you were looking for a theme, you would have to conclude that Simon, still early in his record-breaking career, was mostly interested in demonstrating that men may bluster, but women — whether wives, mothers or sirens — are dopes.The wife arrives first. In “Visitor From Mamaroneck,” Parker plays Karen Nash, a woman who does not know her age because she has not mastered basic arithmetic. (She’s 47.) On what she asserts is her 24th wedding anniversary but is really a day shy of her 23rd, she has arranged for a romantic evening with her husband in the suite she thinks they shared on their wedding night. But Sam Nash (Broderick) is in no mood for romance; as men in such stories always do, he has contracts to work on, with the audience meant to understand that by this he means having an affair with his secretary. (Molly Ranson gives the brief role more dignity than Simon did.)If it’s hard to find the funny in this setup, it’s harder to buy the sad in its payoff; the evident affection between Parker and Broderick, who are married in real life, extinguishes the spark of fury needed to ignite both laughs and pathos. (The original stars were the far more tempestuous George C. Scott and Maureen Stapleton.) Or perhaps Broderick alone is the culprit; he’s about as fiery as a frozen dinner. Parker fares better, occasionally spinning a line to show us that Karen is not as dumb as Sam and Simon think — but she’s pedaling uphill in a story that posits knowledge as a threat to womanly happiness.Broderick and Parker as old flames in the second one-act, “Visitor From Hollywood.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt least it posits something. The second act, “Visitor From Hollywood,” evidently meant as a post-intermission palate cleanser, has barely any content at all, and what it does have is icky. This time the ditz is Muriel Tate, a New Jersey woman who comes to the Plaza to see, for the first time in nearly 17 years, her high school boyfriend, Jesse Kiplinger. Jesse is now a famous movie producer whose every film, we are told, makes money. And though Muriel from Tenafly, like Karen from Mamaroneck, is an innumerate homemaker — her three children, she says, are “a boy and a girl” — she has the saving grace in Simonland of being “extremely attractive” and thus available for mashing.In the manner of a Benny Hill sketch or an off-brand French sex romp, “Visitor From Hollywood” is single-minded, its action consisting solely of Jesse’s escalating stabs at seduction. But when neither his extreme unctuousness nor a pitcher of vodka stingers quite do the trick, he resorts to the ultimate aphrodisiac: name-dropping. It’s finally the likes of Charlton Heston and Yvette Mimieux who get Muriel into bed.That she eagerly falls for this transparent ploy is not the worst part of the story, which is meant as a satire of celebrity culture; Parker makes Muriel’s star-struck, suburban shallowness, if not exactly funny, then at least endearingly odd. And Broderick, in a hilarious wig and eye-bruising plaid pants, begins to thaw a little, intermittently attempting a New Jersey accent and emitting some lustful grunts.But the possibility of responding to this ruttishness with a lenient giggle is forestalled by the ghosts of #MeToo stalking the play; when Jesse, painting himself as the victim of his unfaithful ex-wives, describes them as “three of the worst bitches you’d ever want to meet,” you may find yourself looking, on Muriel’s behalf or your own, for the exit.Parker and Broderick as the increasingly frustrated parents of a jittery bride in the third one-act play, “Visitor From Forest Hills.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAlas, as the third act demonstrates after a pause, the doors in this kind of comedy tend to be locked. In “Visitor From Forest Hills,” Roy and Norma Hubley are at their wits’ end trying to get their daughter, Mimsey, who’s supposed to get married downstairs any minute, to leave the bathroom she’s bolted herself into. As a quasi-violent farce ensues, in which Roy (Broderick) tries smoking her out, screaming through the keyhole and turning himself into a battering ram, Norma (Parker) stands by simpering, contradicting and driving Roy to distraction.The joke, not a bad one in itself, is that in their response to Mimsey’s jitters about the wedding, the bickering Hubleys exemplify exactly what’s worrying her. Will she and Borden, her fiancé, wind up fighting just like her parents? But the problem Simon actually dramatizes isn’t, as he seems to think, marriage: It’s men. The act’s punchline, in which we get a sour taste of the peremptory Borden, only underlines that inadvertent point.You could, I suppose, investigate “Plaza Suite” as a catalog of male failings in midcentury America; certainly “The Odd Couple,” a Simon comedy from 1965, can support such a reading, even if its two female characters are birdbrains. In any case, that’s not what the current production is offering. Rather, it seems to hope we will look forgivingly enough on our benighted past to excuse it with a “that’s how things were” shrug and laugh.But that’s not how things were, it’s just how Simon saw them, at least until he began to grant women some intelligence and agency a decade later, in “Chapter Two.” Looked at now, his “Plaza Suite” jokes, however well formed, keep dying on the vine. The past is not yet past enough to find such an unfair battle of the sexes funny.Plaza SuiteThrough June 26 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan; plazasuitebroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      Marsha Mason’s ‘New York Loft in a Hayfield’

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      After more than two decades in New Mexico, the actress and director is back on the East Coast, with new digs and a renewed focus on the theater.From the front, Marsha Mason’s house in Washington, Conn., is modest as can be — low slung, with small windows — no reason to stop and covetously gawk.“It looks very unassuming,” said the similarly unassuming Ms. Mason, 79, a four-time Oscar nominee (including for 1973’s “Cinderella Liberty” and 1977’s “The Goodbye Girl”), who plays Arlene on the Netflix series “Grace and Frankie,” now in production for its final season.But stroll around to the back, and it’s a different story altogether: an expanse of floor-to-ceiling glass framed in gray cedar, and a terrace with a seating and dining area that runs the width of the rectilinear structure, making the great outdoors feel part and parcel of the great indoors (and vice versa).Think of the house and the eight-acre setting as Ms. Mason’s Act Three.After more than two decades in Abiquiu, N.M., where she built a 7,000-square-foot house and an art barn, and started a business that specialized in organic medicinal herbs, Ms. Mason was eager to downsize and refocus her attention on theater work — in particular, directing.Marsha Mason, a four-time Oscar nominee and two-time Golden Globe winner, lives in a custom-built contemporary house in Washington, Conn. Much of the furniture in the house comes from her previous residences. Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesMarsha Mason, 79Occupation: Actor and directorSense of direction: “I feel that getting more serious as a theater director came out of building houses. It’s all about preproduction.”To be sure, she has lovely memories and no regrets.“When I moved to New Mexico, the movie business was changing. It was getting very youth-oriented, and roles weren’t coming as much as before,” she said. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. In some ways, I was having a little bit of an identity crisis. What Abiquiu was about was me maturing and becoming a full-blown human being, in that I had my show-business work and a lot of other, different work.“It was an interesting place during all those years,” she added. “Gene Hackman lived there while I was there. Jane Fonda lived there. And my friend Shirley MacLaine lived up a mountain across the road. She’d come down to my house for Christmas dinner on a golf cart dressed as Santa.”“I knew I wanted this house to have a great room,” she said.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesIn 2014, Ms. Mason sold the 247-acre property and returned to the New York area, where she had typically owned or rented an apartment even after moving to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s with her second husband, the playwright Neil Simon. (The marriage ended in 1983.)This time, she decided to hang her hat in western Connecticut, where she had friends in the area. Briefly under consideration was a large house with many bedrooms, many nooks and many crannies. “Then I thought, ‘No, I’m not going to have something of that size again,’” Ms. Mason recalled. “But I asked the owners if they would sell the hayfield that was attached to the house, and they agreed.”It took a while to conceptualize this, the fourth home she would be building from scratch. (The others were in New Mexico and Los Angeles.) But Ms. Mason was clear on certain points long before the heavy machinery rolled in: She wanted it to be all on one floor and of manageable dimensions. She wanted solar panels (but didn’t want to see them), radiant heat, a great room, a “really nice bathroom” and a guest room on the opposite side of the house from her own quarters.“The design grew out of all that,” Ms. Mason said of the resulting 2,600-square-foot contemporary, which she is fond of characterizing as a “New York loft in a hayfield.”A photo of Ms. Mason and her friend Paul Newman hangs in the laundry room. The two bonded over their love of car-racing.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“I find that, in general, it’s the details that set things apart — what kind of door you choose or what kind of sconce,” she said, offering the example of the bright red bookcase that on one side houses a television screen and, on the other, serves as gallery space for several paintings. “I knew I wanted to do certain things like that.”The house is a study in contrasts: plain exterior and — thanks to a trove of furniture and art from around the world and from various stages of her life and career — vibrant, eclectic interior. Here, a 19th-century Spanish chair; there, a sofa from Design Within Reach. Over there, a country French bureau.Twenty-five years ago, when Ms. Mason was being honored at a film festival in Egypt, she did some shopping and brought back a game table with parquetry inlay and mosaic chairs. Those made their way from New Mexico to Connecticut. A pair of spindle chairs with rush seats and leather cushions were bought for the Bel-Air house that she shared with Mr. Simon. After the couple split, she kept the chairs, which have since been outfitted with crushed-velvet pillows.The Tulip dining table and chairs were bought post-divorce when she moved into a co-op on Central Park West. They’re now in a corner keeping company with a vivid abstract and a painted wood sculpture of a mother and child that was part of the décor during her years with Mr. Simon.Three wood female figures from Thailand and a wooden head of a merry-faced king from one of Ms. Mason’s trips to India are displayed atop the Stûv fireplace that dominates the great room. A Ganesh statue sits sentry in the hall outside her bedroom.Ms. Mason bought the game table and chairs in Egypt 25 years ago, when she was being honored at a film festival.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesBehind the antique rosewood desk in the office are shelves with assorted trophies, among them two Golden Globes. And perhaps because distraction is always welcome when you’re folding towels and sheets, a wall in the laundry room is given over to framed award citations and photographs of Ms. Mason’s stepdaughters, of her with her father, and of her with Paul Newman. The two became fast friends through their shared passion for auto racing. “He eventually invited me to Lime Rock, here in Connecticut, his home track, and I drove one of his GTs,” she recalled.“The sink where I wash up after I do my gardening is here in the laundry room,” Ms. Mason said. “So I see these pictures every day.”Moving into the house necessitated winnowing, she said. Many things were jettisoned or left behind for the new owner in Abiquiu.“This place,” she added, “reflects my sense of aging and ‘what do you need?’ not ‘what do you want?’ It’s about a few nice pieces as opposed to a lot of nice pieces — the whole psyche of simplifying.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More