The Prisoner of Second Avenue: A New Comedy [Paperback]

Mel, in the great tradition of most people living in New York City even if they are not Neil Simon characters, complains about every inconvenience in his life, whether it is real or not. The people next door are always too loud, the toilet runs far too long when you flush it, and even fourteen floors above street level the garbage smells too bad. Edna knows that she is not responsible for her husband's constant barrage of complaints, but before she can figure out exactly what his problem is he has a new one: Mel gets fired. To add insult to his injury before he can get home and tell Edna their apartment is burglarized. As Mel gets the details on what has been taken and the part his wife had in making it easier for the crooks, the one-liners keep coming fast and furious, but Simon is doing more than that, because Mel is starting to lose it and before the curtain drops on Act One he has suffered a nervous breakdown.

Of course Edna does not know what to do about Mel, but then neither do his two sisters or his brother, although they have plenty of suggestions. They are also worried about Edna, and their concern for their brother and his wife is mixed with their humiliation that their own flesh and blood would have some sort of mental problem. They agree that they should give Mel "X" amount of dollars, but figuring out the value of "X" might kill them. "The Prisoner of Second Avenue" is a comedy, but it is still one of Simon's darkest plays with a lot of the humor having to do with Mel's paranoid delusions. Our sympathies are with the character even when he is not overly sympathetic and part of the reason for this is that Edna supports him, even when she has to suddenly support herself as well. Beyond that Mel's rants are funny, in a way that goes well beyond what we were getting from Archie Bunker at that same time (The "All in the Family" comparison is also apt because in may ways this play is staged like a television situation comedy).

Ultimately this play is about survival, a theme that Simon would revisit three year's later in "God's Favorite," his ambitious attempt to make a modern parable out of the Biblical story of Job. However in "The Prisoner of Second Avenue" the obvious counterpart is Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" in many ways, although obviously Simon's play is a lot funnier. But when Mel declares, "I still have value, I still have worth," it is hard not to see the parallels. At that point the differences become more prominent, because Mel goes down fighting in a way that Willy Loman does not, and Edna finds her strength well before the point where it would have been too late.

I think this is one of Simon's best plays and that it still gets its fair share of productions by community theaters and such because it comes down to character as much as it does to humor. I know, however, that my perceptions might be skewed because of two indelible and silent moments from the first time I saw this play on stage. The first was when Mel has his breakdown, a split second before the lights fade to black and the second was the flip on Grant Wood's "American Gothic" that we are treated to at the end of the play. For all the great one-liners (such as how old Moses had to be when the miracles occured) it was those images that defined the scope of this play for me.