I recently performed in Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs, playing the patriarch Jack Jerome.   The play is a semi-autobiographical look at the playwright’s formative years, and according to his wife, Elaine Joyce Simon, “If you’re looking for the heart and soul of Neil Simon, you’ll find everything you need to know in Brighton Beach Memoirs.   As an aspiring playwright myself, I wanted to get inside Mr. Simon’s head, and see what advice he could offer.  As it turns out, there’s a lot of wisdom in his memoirs,  Rewrites (1996) and The Play Goes On (1999).  Here are some selected pearls of wisdom that I gleaned from listening to what Simon says.

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