SOURCE: A review of Henry IV and others, in The Nation, New York, Vol. 252, No. 13, April 8, 1991, pp. 458-60.

In the following excerpt, Disch attributes Broadway's future to plays written by Ayckbourn, Neil Simon and others.

The good news from Broadway comes in the familiar form of comedies by Neil Simon and Alan Ayckbourn, the most consistently popular and prolific purveyors to commercial theater in New York and London. Ayckbourn's plays have not had nearly the success on Broadway that they’ve had on the West End, and so for two of them to be playing at once is almost like having an Ayckbourn festival, albeit of a retrospective nature, since both plays have had to wait a fair while to cross the Atlantic. Absent Friends (1974), at the Manhattan Theatre Club (technically not Broadway, but just around the corner), is the older of the two and conceptually the more...