As The Prisoner of Second Avenue begins to unfold, it's clear that Mel Edison … is your prototypical middle-class New Yorker. A 46-year-old account executive who has lived six years in his 14th floor apartment …, he is beset by all the existential woes of the urban condition….

Mel Edison, in brief, is quite literally losing his sanity; and in establishing this condition, Neil Simon has done his best work to date…. If it is not a wholly successful play, it is a wholly admirable one.

In those opening moments, Simon catches the feel of New York existence, the sense of raw nerve ends rubbing crazily against each other, about as well as anyone ever has. If art consists in appropriating the stuff of everyday existence and stripping it down to essentials, he has made a mad, dissonant art form out of ordinary urban clay. His concern is reminiscent of...