Before he turned to the stage, Chekhov (see bio below)
wrote some of the world’s greatest short stories.
By turns touching and hilarious, they’ve been adapted for the theatre
by the master of comic dialogue Neil Simon.
A Broadway hit in 1973.

Cast:

The cast of The Good Doctor includes two actors very familiar to The Washington Stage Guild audiences: Morgan Duncan (WSG’s Murder in the Cathedral, Lucia Mad, The Makropoulos Secret, Major Barbara, among others, two decades with Capitol Steps, Arena Stage, Shakespeare Theater Company, Round House Theatre) and Lynn Steinmetz (founding company member of WSG, most recently Mrs. Warren’s Profession, The Nibroc Trilogy, Arena Stage, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Olney Theatre Center), as well as Scott Harrison (WSG’s Widowers’ Houses, Arena Stage’s Fiddler on the Roof, productions at Theatre Under the Stars), Arika Thames (Rorschach Theatre’s Chemical Exile: Synthesis, Prologue Theatre’s The Revolutionists), and Cameron McNary (Compass Rose Theatre’s Pygmalion, Olney Theatre Center’s Dial M for Murder; playwright of Of Dice and Men, Shoggoths on the Veldt).

(1860–1904)
Russian writer Anton Chekhov is recognized as a master of the modern short story and a leading playwright of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Youth and Education
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on January 29, 1860, in Taganrog, Russia. His father, Pavel, was a grocer with frequent money troubles; his mother, Yevgeniya, shared her love of storytelling with Chekhov and his five siblings.

When Pavel’s business failed in 1875, he took the family to Moscow to look for other work while Chekhov remained in Taganrog until he finished his studies. Chekhov finally joined his family in Moscow in 1879 and enrolled at medical school. With his father still struggling financially, Chekhov supported the family with his freelance writing, producing hundreds of short comic pieces under a pen name for local magazines.

Early Writing Career
During the mid-1880s, Chekhov practiced as a physician and began to publish serious works of fiction under his own name. His pieces appeared in the newspaper New Times and then as part of collections such as Motley Stories (1886). His story “The Steppe” was an important success, earning its author the Pushkin Prize in 1888. Like most of Chekhov’s early work, it showed the influence of the major Russian realists of the 19th century, such as Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Major Works
Chekhov wrote many of his greatest works from the 1890s through the last few years of his life. In his short stories of that period, including “Ward No. 6” and “The Lady with the Dog,” he revealed a profound understanding of human nature and the ways in which ordinary events can carry deeper meaning.

In his plays of these years, Chekhov concentrated primarily on mood and characters, showing that they could be more important than the plots. Not much seems to happen to his lonely, often desperate characters, but their inner conflicts take on great significance. Their stories are very specific, painting a picture of pre-revolutionary Russian society, yet timeless.

From the late 1890s onward, Chekhov collaborated with Constantin Stanislavski and the Moscow Art Theater on productions of his plays, including his masterpieces The Seagull (1895), Uncle Vanya (1897), The Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904).

Later Life and Death
In 1901, Chekhov married Olga Knipper, an actress from the Moscow Art Theatre. However, by this point his health was in decline due to the tuberculosis that had affected him since his youth. While staying at a health resort in Badenweiler, Germany, he died in the early hours of July 15, 1904, at the age of 44.

Chekhov is considered one of the major literary figures of his time. His plays are still staged worldwide, and his overall body of work influenced important writers of an array of genres, including James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams and Henry Miller.

One of the first non-Russians to praise Chekhov’s plays was George Bernard Shaw, who subtitled his Heartbreak House “A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes,” and pointed out similarities between the predicament of the British landed class and that of their Russian counterparts as depicted by Chekhov: “the same nice people, the same utter futility.” 

Ernest Hemingway, another writer influenced by Chekhov, was more grudging: “Chekhov wrote about six good stories. But he was an amateur writer.” And Vladimir Nabokov criticised Chekhov’s “medley of dreadful prosaisms, ready-made epithets, repetitions.” But he also declared “yet it is his works which I would take on a trip to another planet” and described Chekhov as writing “the way one person relates to another the most important things in his life, slowly and yet without a break, in a slightly subdued voice.” 

For the writer William Boyd, Chekhov’s historical accomplishment was to abandon what William Gerhardie called the “event plot” for something more “blurred, interrupted, mauled or otherwise tampered with by life.” 

Virginia Woolf mused on the unique quality of a Chekhov story in The Common Reader (1925):

But is it the end, we ask? We have rather the feeling that we have overrun our signals; or it is as if a tune had stopped short without the expected chords to close it. These stories are inconclusive, we say, and proceed to frame a criticism based upon the assumption that stories ought to conclude in a way that we recognise. In so doing we raise the question of our own fitness as readers. Where the tune is familiar and the end emphatic—lovers united, villains discomfited, intrigues exposed—as it is in most Victorian fiction, we can scarcely go wrong, but where the tune is unfamiliar and the end a note of interrogation or merely the information that they went on talking, as it is in Tchekov, we need a very daring and alert sense of literature to make us hear the tune, and in particular those last notes which complete the harmony. 

(1927-2018)

American playwright Neil Simon penned some of Broadway’s most memorable productions, including ‘The Odd Couple’ and ‘Lost in Yonkers.’

Who Was Neil Simon?

Neil Simon began his career writing comedy for some of radio and television’s top talents in the 1940s. Turning to the stage, he enjoyed his first major hit with Barefoot in the Park in 1963, and later scored Tony Awards for The Odd Couple (1965), Biloxi Blues (1985) and Lost in Yonkers (1991). Simon also became a successful screenwriter, earning acclaim for both original and adapted works. In addition to his numerous Tony and Academy Award nominations, Simon in 1983 became the first living playwright to have a Broadway theater named in his honor. 

Early Life

Marvin Neil Simon was born on July 4, 1927, in the Bronx. (Some sources state he was born in Manhattan.) He grew up in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, where he lived with his parents, Irving and Mamie, and his older brother, Danny. His parents had a tumultuous marriage, with Irving often leaving the family for months at a time. As a result, Simon took refuge in the movies as a child, finding particular solace and delight in comedies.

Early Radio and TV Writing

Neil Simon took a job in the Warner Brothers Manhattan office mailroom. A pivotal moment came when he and Danny created a sketch for radio producer Ace Goodman, launching their careers as a comedy-writing team. The brothers soon began writing material for stars like Milton Berle and Jackie Gleason. (Hastening his work as a playwright, Simon said “I did not want to become a middle-aged man waiting for the phone to ring so I could go to work writing gags for some abusive, unappreciative s— like Jackie Gleason.)

In the early 1950s, Neil and Danny Simon joined the all-star writing cast of the Sid Caesar television series Your Show of Shows, which also included Mel Brooks, Woody Allen and Carl Reiner. By the middle of the decade the brothers had parted ways, but Neil Simon continued his success via the small screen; he earned Emmy Award consideration for his work with Caesar, and also wrote for The Phil Silvers Show and The Garry Moore Show.

Broadway Stardom

Simon began writing for the stage while still employed as a TV writer, collaborating with his brother for the short-lived musical Catch a Star! in 1955. His first solo play, Come Blow Your Horn, began a solid run on Broadway in 1961, following years of rewrites. However, it was his follow-up effort, Barefoot in the Park (1963), that established the playwright as a star in his field, a reputation that was cemented with his instant classic about mismatched roommates, the Tony Award-winning The Odd Couple (1965).

Simon’s string of Broadway successes included four plays running simultaneously during the 1966-67 season. He scored major hits with Promises, Promises (1968), a musical based on the 1960 Billy Wilder film The Apartment, and with The Sunshine Boys (1972), a tribute to the bygone art of vaudeville.

Simon drew extensively from his own life and upbringing in his theatrical writing. Chapter Two (1977), about a widowed writer embarking on a new relationship, began its stage run four years after the death of Simon’s first wife. The playwright also mined his personal history for the “Eugene Trilogy” — Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), Biloxi Blues (1985) and Broadway Bound (1986) — with its New York City-born protagonist spending time in the military before teaming with his brother to write comedy.

Despite his popularity and immense success, Simon at times endured less-than-stellar reviews from critics who considered his work sentimental and mainstream. However, he finally achieved a critical breakthrough when his 1991 play, Lost in Yonkers, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, along with a Tony for Best Play.

Other Works

Simon adapted many of his plays for the big screen. The Odd Couple famously became both an Oscar-nominated film in 1968 (Simon credited Walter Matthau’s rumpled persona and ironic wit as being the inspiration for Oscar) and an acclaimed TV series in the early 1970s, and Simon also delivered successful film adaptations of Plaza Suite (1971), The Sunshine Boys (1975) and California Suite (1978), among others.

Simon also penned two memoirs: Rewrites was published in 1996, and The Play Goes On followed in 1999.

Accolades

Simon was nominated for 17 Tony Awards over the course of his career, winning three times and garnering a special Tony in 1975 for his contributions to theater. Additionally, he was nominated for four Academy Awards, named a Kennedy Center Honoree and earned honorary degrees from such institutions as Williams College and Hofstra University.

In 1983, the Shubert Organization changed the name of the 1920s-era Alvin Theatre to the Neil Simon Theatre, making him the first living playwright to have a Broadway venue named in his honor.

Death

Simon passed away on August 26, 2018, at a Manhattan hospital due to complications from pneumonia. 

Television series

Simon, as a member of a writing staff, penned material for the following shows:

• The Garry Moore Show (1950)
• Your Show of Shows (1950–54)
• Caesar’s Hour (1954–57)
• Stanley (1956)
• The Phil Silvers Show (1958–59)
• Kibbee Hates Fitch (1965 – pilot for a never-made series; this episode by Simon aired once on CBS on August 2, 1965)

Movies made for television

The following made-for-TV movies were all written solely by Simon, and all based on his earlier plays or screenplays

• The Good Doctor (1978)
• Plaza Suite (1987)
• Broadway Bound (1992)
• The Sunshine Boys (1996)
• Jake’s Women (1996)
• London Suite (1996)
• Laughter on the 23rd Floor (2001)
• The Goodbye Girl (2004)

Theatre

• Come Blow Your Horn (1961)
• Little Me (1962)
• Barefoot in the Park (1963)
• The Odd Couple (1965)
• Sweet Charity (1966)
• The Star-Spangled Girl (1966)
• Plaza Suite (1968)
• Promises, Promises (1968)
• Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1969)
• The Gingerbread Lady (1970)
• The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1971)
• The Sunshine Boys (1972)
• The Good Doctor (1973)
• God’s Favorite (1974)
• California Suite (1976)
• Chapter Two (1977)
• They’re Playing Our Song (1979)
• I Ought to Be in Pictures (1980)
• Fools (1981)
• Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983)
• Biloxi Blues (1985)
• Broadway Bound (1986)
• Rumors (1988)
• Lost in Yonkers (1991)
• Jake’s Women (1992)
• The Goodbye Girl (1993)
• Laughter on the 23rd Floor (1993)
• London Suite (1995)
• Proposals (1997)
• The Dinner Party (2000)
• 45 Seconds from Broadway (2001)
• Rose’s Dilemma (2003)

In addition to these plays and musicals, Simon has twice rewritten or updated his 1965 play The Odd Couple. Both updated versions have run under new titles: The Female Odd Couple (1985) and Oscar and Felix: A New Look at the Odd Couple (2002).

Screenplays

• After the Fox (with Cesare Zavattini) (1966)
• Barefoot in the Park (1967)
• The Odd Couple (1968)
• The Out-of-Towners (1970)
• Plaza Suite (1971)
• Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1972)
• The Heartbreak Kid (1972)
• The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975)
• The Sunshine Boys (1975)
• Murder by Death (1976)
• The Goodbye Girl (1977)
• The Cheap Detective (1978)
• California Suite (1978)
• Chapter Two (1979)
• Seems Like Old Times (1980)
• Only When I Laugh (1981)
• I Ought to Be in Pictures (1982)
• Max Dugan Returns (1983)
• The Lonely Guy (1984) (adaptation only; screenplay by Ed. Weinberger and Stan Daniels)
• The Slugger’s Wife (1985)
• Brighton Beach Memoirs (1986)
• Biloxi Blues (1988)
• The Marrying Man (1991)
• Lost in Yonkers (1993)
• The Odd Couple II (1998)

The 2022-2023 Season of Transitions:

The Washington Stage Guild, having successfully and safely returned to in-person performances in the 2021-2022 season, proudly announces its upcoming year’s repertory, a season of plays that look, fittingly, at the challenges of transition. Whether from childhood to adulthood or faith to doubt, acceptance of the inevitable or a need to find a path to social change, the need to adapt is an important part of life, as the changes of the past two years have shown us all. These four plays, ranging from a witty adaptation of great short stories to one of the greatest plays of the early modern theatre, and from an enigmatic dark comedy to a humorous recounting of a true story from the Civil War, explore in many ways the journeys we all must go on as we navigate the world.  NOTE: All patrons must wear masks at all times while in the theatre.