Newsroom

 

   God's Favorite (Reading)
   September 25-28, 208

  

   Fools
   October 15- November 16, 2008

  

   Lost in Yonkers (reading)
   November 20-23, 2008

  

   Biloxi Blues
   January 14-February 15, 2009

  

   Jake's Women
   March 4-April 5, 2009

  

   The Sunshine Boys
   May 13- June 14, 2009

  

   2009-2010 Playwright
   Sneak Preview (reading)
   June 18-21, 2009

 

 

 

From the Artistic Director of Profile Theatre, Jane Unger:

 

"It gives me great pleasure to announce that next year Profile's season- long relationship will be with none other than the great American playwright Neil Simon. Author of over 30 plays, Neil Simon is considered by many to be the world's most successful playwright. He has received more Academy and Tony award nominations than any other writer and is the only playwright to have had four Broadway productions running simultaneously (1966: Sweet Charity, Star Spangled Girl, The Odd Couple, Barefoot the Park) and has had more plays adapted to film than any other American playwright, in addition to writing a number of original screenplays, himself.

 

Born in the Bronx on the fourth of July, Neil Simon's plays are informed by the American optimism of a true Yankee Doodle Dandy and the rich Yiddish humor of Molly Picon, who, I like to believe, is related to all Jewish Americans. After choosing the playwright, the next challenge is deciding which plays to produce. Over the years, I've discovered that with many of the playwrights we've featured, we could have easily presented two seasons by that one single playwright because of that writer's richness, diversity and extensive body of work. Mr. Simon could keep us in business for the next five years, easily.

 

Next season, Profile wil continue to produce four full productions and three staged readings but for something different, we're planning to kick off the season with a staged reading which, if we can obtain funding for this project, will be completely free. Profile has never done anything like this before and it is our way both of giving back to the community and of reaching out to new audiences. The other new feature to our season will be that the third staged reading will be scheduled for mid-June and will be a sneak preview of a play by the upcoming season's playwright.

 

Before I introduce the plays themselves and the actors who will be reading scenes from the them, I want to read something written by Neil Simon in 1998, as part of his Introduction to The Collected Plays of Neil Simon, volume 4, entitled How to Stop Writing and Other Impossibilities.

"I presently have no thoughts for a new play, but that hasn't stopped me before. To quote Walter Kerr, former reviewer for the NY Times and my favorite critic ever, from his opening night review of my December 1966 play, The Star-Spangled Girl, "Neil Simon didn't have an idea for a new play this year, but he wrote it anyway." It was the best bad review I ever received. From it I learned that if you do not have a burning passion to write a particular story, if you are not so eager to get to the typewriter in the morning and so reluctant to leave it when the sun begins to set, so driven that you're willing to forgo family, friends, food and sex, so preoccupied that you have trouble remembering your daughter's first name or that you've forgotten to remove your socks when taking a shower (if indeed you found time to take the shower), then don't write the play. It takes all that motivation just to make it a passable work. To make it something wonderful, to quote Hemingway, or to quote the biographer who quoted Hemingway, "The writing of a book (for me a play) should destroy the writer. If there is anything left, he has not worked hard enough. The writer himself does not matter, the book is everything." 

-Neil Simon 

I daresay that the six Neil Simon plays you will see next year at Profile are sterling examples of the play being everything. Mr. Simon may have felt destroyed in the process of writing them, but he resurfaced after each one to get up and do it again and he continues to do that as we sit here tonight.

 

Profile will begin its season with a staged reading of God's Favorite (September 25-28, 2008), written in 1974 and a re-telling of the story of Job, set in Great Neck Long Island .

 

Our first full production will be Fools (Ocotber 15- November 16, 2008), written in 1981 as a fable it is set in 1890 in a small Russian village, that has been struck with the curse of stupidity, originating over a botched love affair hundreds of years earlier. The village advertises for teachers to come to lift the curse by teaching one particular young lady, a descendent of the cursed family.

 

Fools will be immediately followed by a staged reading of Simon's Pulitzer Prize wining play, Lost in Yonkers (November 20-23, 2008) and that will be followed by a full production of Simon's smash hit, Biloxi Blues (January 14-February 15, 2009), the middle play in Simon's autobiographical trilogy in which we follow the life of one Eugene Jerome. Biloxi Blues, written in 1985 is a coming of manhood story centering on a group of six young men at boot camp in Biloxi, Mississippi,1943 as they prepare to be sent off to WWII. 

 

The next full production will be Simon's play, Jake's Women (March 4-April 5, 2009), written in 1992. This is the story of a successful writer who eight years into his second marriage comes to terms with the fact that his marriage is in danger of falling apart. His attempt to work his way through this life-crisis is to invoke the characters of all the many women in his life-from his sister to his analyst to his dead first wife to his daughter at various ages. I think it is one of Simon's most intriguing and original plays and perhaps the one that has the most to teach us about writing.

 

Profile will close out the season with the play that is the most performed of any of his plays and a defining example of Simon's humor and sensibility-The Sunshine Boys (May 13- June 14, 2009). This is Simon's valentine to vaudeville as we follow the story of the dynamic comic duo, Lewis and Clark. The two men have not spoken for 11 years, having fallen into a silly feud over nothing. They had worked the vaudeville circuit together for 43 years and are now being asked to perform their most famous sketch for a TV special on the history of comedy."