SOURCE: Weales, Gerald. “American Theater Watch, 1984-1985.” Georgia Review 39, no. 3 (fall 1985): 619–21.

In the following essay, Weales comments on an interview with Rabe and Neil Simon on the dark comedy found in Hurlyburly.

There was a joint interview with Neil Simon and David Rabe in The New York Times Magazine for 26 May 1985, and, as the Times said in its introductory remarks, “their attitudes and methods of play writing turned out to be strikingly similar.” That might at first seem a little odd since Simon is the most triumphantly successful Broadway playwright of the last twenty-five years, and Rabe, since he arrived in New York in 1971 with The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones, has been recognized as a dramatist of importance, a label that has more to do with artistic than with financial success. “Playwrights talk to commuters,” Carlotta O'Neill is supposed to have said. “Dramatists...