There is one marvelous moment in Rose’s Dilemma that will stay with me longer than anything else from this theater season. How many other theatergoers will remember it depends on how many are still in attendance and awake by that stage of the play: at the performance I caught, the customer on my left was dozing happily and the couple on the right cut their losses at intermission.

The author of Rose’s Dilemma is Neil Simon. For thirty years, he was the most reliable joke machine on Broadway—plays (Barefoot in the Park) and musicals (Sweet Charity), plus more spin-offs to Hollywood (The Goodbye Girl) and TV (The Odd Couple) than most theater men of his generation combined, not to mention the transvestite rewrites (the all-girl version of The Odd Couple) and lame sequels (The Odd Couple 2) that few other playwrights get the chance to eke out a last drop or two of maximum mileage on. He’s 76 now, which on Broadway is young. But he hasn’t had a hit in a decade, and there’s nothing so redundant as a commercial playwright who’s uncommercial. Had the whole Cats thing not worked out for T. S. Eliot, he could have gone back to the day job at the bank and carried on writing the slim poetry volumes that sell 800 copies. But, if you’ve been operating at Cats-level most of your life, it’s much harder to re-position