I’m thinking of a famous 20th-century author who used to be immensely popular for his comedies, which made him the most successful commercial playwright of his generation. For a brief time he was even taken seriously by the critics, who saw in his work a reflection of the spirit of the age, and who also thought that at least some of his plays might have a permanent life in revival. Then he hit a bad patch, turning out a string of ineffective scripts at the very moment that a new generation of theatergoers was looking for something new. Tastes changed, and he woke up one day to find himself unfashionable.
If you thought I was talking about Neil Simon, whose Rose’s Dilemma opens tonight at the Manhattan Theatre Club (and which I will be reviewing in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal), you were right. But with one small addition, the same things could be said of No