MONDAY, APRIL 25 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C9
will share in some of his creativity
and benefit deeply from this in
whatever way,” she continued.
“And I would love for someone to
come along and write like Neil.”
Horowitz estimated that it will
take another six months to go
through all of the documents.
“There’s a script for ‘Barefoot in
the Park’ that’s so fragile that I’m
afraid to even touch it because the
paper is so old that it sort of
frazzles away,” he said.
Joyce thinks the donation sig-
nals another beginning for a play-
wright who always believed in new
ones. And why not? He titled one
of his plays, after all, “Chapter
Two.”The Library of Congress will live-stream
the announcement of the Neil Simon
acquisition, moderated by “Plaza
Suite” director John Benjamin Hickey,
on its YouTube channel Monday at 7
p.m.The Neil Simon collection is not
the library’s largest theater-relat-
ed archive by a long shot: The
papers and other items in Leonard
Bernstein’s bequest, for example,
total about 400,000, Horowitz
said. Some of Simon’s original
writing had gone to Harvard Uni-
versity. Joyce said she was im-
pressed with how beautifully Har-
vard handled that material, but
she decided that much of what she
had of her husband’s output and
memorabilia should go to the Li-
brary of Congress.
“I didn’t want to part with his
stuff. I didn’t want to let him go,”
she said. “I would go to the storage
bin and just cry.” During the peri-
ods of pandemic shutdown, she
added, she stayed in touch with
Librarian of Congress Carla
Hayden and her staff, and then,
“Finally I called and said, ‘I’m
ready for the movers.’ ”
“I hope the American peoplehim, despite his bottomless de-
pravity.
The possibly limited-on-pur-
pose characterizations in favor of
a systemic focus — in conjunction
with the many, many stories “We
Own This City” takes on — leaves
the series somewhat didactic and
airless. But viewers who aren’t
already familiar with the GTTF
scandal are in for a harrowing
account of police criminality. It’s
the kind of flabbergasting tale
that makes you wonder how many
others like it are still out there.We Own This City (one hour)
premieres Monday at 9 p.m. on HBO.charisma. The performances here
are fine but not especially notable,
penned in by the scant screen time
any member of the enormous en-
semble is allotted. (Other than
Britt-Gibson, the standout is Ja-
mie Hector — best known as the
villainous Marlo on “The Wire” —
who plays a homicide detective
worried that his years working
alongside Jenkins will taint his
career.) Perhaps Simon and Pele-
canos wanted to avoid the pitfall
that trapped “The Shield”: view-
ers identifying with the repulsive
protagonist, as many rooted for
Michael Chiklis’s Vic Mackey to
keep outfoxing everyone aroundeasily — though, satisfyingly,
there’s no honor among thieves,
the reckless profligacy of Jen-
kins’s thefts stirring an unexpect-
ed self-disgust among his troops.
The series may be most effective
when the investigators talk to the
victims of GTTF’s mayhem, as the
human cost of police brutality on
everyday people piles up.
“The Wire” is mostly lauded
today for its big-picture depiction
of law enforcement and the civic
necrosis that makes effective po-
lice work a Sisyphean task, but, as
fans know, it also boasted gor-
geously crafted characters and
countless actors with staggeringpolice department via consent de-
cree.
“We Own This City” is closer to
a Simon-Pelecanos also-ran than
another masterwork a la “The
Wire.” (The look of this series,
from director Reinaldo Marcus
Green of “King Richard,” does
strongly recall that predecessor’s
drab realism.) Six hours may in
fact not be a large enough canvas
for all that the writers want to
accomplish — especially their ef-
forts to shoehorn observations
about how policing has changed
after Gray’s death in 2015. The
interviewers elicit confessions
from the dirty cops a little tooto enter. There are dozens of char-
acters (some played by familiar
faces from “The Wire”), and the
scripts are heavily peppered with
statistics and unexplained jargon
and acronyms. The first couple of
chapters are especially — and to
be frank, unnecessarily — opaque,
jumping between timelines with
little payoff. The remaining in-
stallments are structured around
interviews, either by the pair of
investigators (Dagmara Dominc-
zyk and Don Harvey) working to
take down the GTTF or the federal
civil rights attorney (Wunmi Mo-
saku) hoping to make the case for
a bigger overhaul of the Baltimorethe past few years might be their
newfound adeptness at parroting
the talking points the public
wants to hear.
Showrunner Pelecanos dis-
plays no shortage of ambition.
“We Own This City” is a portrait of
how police corruption destroys a
city: draining its coffers to pay
settlements, disillusioning the cit-
izenry of its leaders and institu-
tions, and emboldening officers to
act without regard to law or mo-
rality. Baltimore is its case study,
but as one of the show’s preachy
monologues makes clear, a Jen-
kins could happen anywhere.
That impression is bolstered by
the series’ similarities to “The
Shield,” the FX police thriller that
took inspiration from Los Ange-
les’s late-1990s Rampart scandal.
By 2017, Jenkins is the leader of
the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF),
a rogue unit within the Baltimore
police department that ostensibly
targets drug crimes. The elite
squad actually includes some of
the city’s worst offenders. Several
of its officers have already been
penalized by internal affairs for
misconduct, such as the smoothly
opportunistic Jemell Ryan (a
scene-stealing Darrell Britt-Gib-
son). Others are on a list of cops no
longer allowed to testify in court
because of their history of perjury,
such as the pugnacious, born-to-
bully Daniel Hersl (Josh Charles
playing against type). Still others
openly aspire to live like their
criminal associates, such as the
swaggering Momodu “G Money”
Gondo (McKinley Belcher III).
Like other shows by Simon and
Pelecanos, “We Own This City”
isn’t a particularly inviting world
TV REVIEW FROM C1
‘We Own This City’ gives a harrowing account of e≠ects of police corruption
PHOTOS BY PAUL SCHIRALDI/HBO
LEFT: Wunmi Mosaku as a federal civil rights attorney in HBO’s “We Own This City.” RIGHT: Actor Jon Bernthal, left, and director Reinaldo Marcus Green. Adapted by
David Simon and George Pelecanos from Justin Fenton’s nonfiction book, HBO’s “We Own This City” premieres Monday at 9 p.m.Simon’s 1983 film comedy, “Max
Dugan Returns.”
“He was always pretty nice to
me, but he was professional. He
kept a distance,” Broderick re-
called over the phone. “In rehears-
als, you would see him lean over
into [director] Gene Saks. I would
see Neil’s head whip over to Gene.
And then Gene would say, ‘Um, can
you not take that pause?’ If he was
happy, Neil could be extremely
generous and very kind.”
And appreciative, too, of his
own wit. “He enjoyed his own
jokes greatly,” Broderick said, add-
ing that his speed at creating a
great comic moment was uncanny.
During a short break in rehearsals
for “Biloxi Blues,” the second play
in the “Brighton Beach” trilogy,
Broderick said that Simon dashed
off one of the funniest scenes in the
play, involving Eugene’s sexual ini-
tiation. “He totally did it while we
stood around,” he said.be when the word ‘living’ no lon-
ger applies.” The collection con-
tains notebooks, too, with drafts of
the opening-night letters he wrote
to the people in his shows, as was
the case with the original 1991
“Lost in Yonkers” cast that includ-
ed Irene Worth, Kevin Spacey,
Mark Blum and Mercedes Ruehl.
“And not just to the cast,” Horo-
witz said, “but the set designer, the
lighting designer, the casting di-
rector. And the one to Mercedes
Ruehl makes me cry. It’s just heart-
rending.”
Laughs, though, are what he’ll
always be known for. Matthew
Broderick, who essentially has
been a Neil Simon interpreter
throughout his professional life,
got an astonishing break via the
playwright at the start of his ca-
reer: On the same day, he was cast
as both Eugene Jerome in the
original Broadway production of
“Brighton Beach Memoirs” and inSimon die-hards and theater
scholars will doubtless be in-
trigued not only by the drafts of
rarely revived plays such as “The
Good Doctor,” “Proposals” and
“Jake’s Women,” but also by the
breathtaking number of fragmen-
tary and unproduced plays and
film scripts. “There’s a screenplay
for ‘The Merry Widows,’ which was
written for Bette Midler and
Whoopi Goldberg,” Horowitz re-
counted. Simon also contemplat-
ed a musical built around tunes by
George and Ira Gershwin that
Horowitz said had alternate pro-
posed titles: “Embraceable You”
and “A Foggy Day.”
The letters, in particular, reveal
a sentimental side that the taci-
turn Simon tended not to show to
the public. “I have long said that
you are the best living American
playwright,” he declared, in a
handwritten missive to August
Wilson, “and you probably still willlibrary, at an event with Joyce and
Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jes-
sica Parker, stars of the Broadway
revival of Simon’s “Plaza Suite.”
“Neil really is for the people,”
Joyce said in a telephone interview
about her husband, who died in
August 2018 at the age of 91. “This
is America’s library, and this is
where he belongs. He is America’s
playwright.”
Parker, who plays a trio of Si-
mon characters alongside her hus-
band in the three playlets of “Plaza
Suite,” said that speaking Simon’s
lines nightly reinforces for her the
durability of his impact. “It’s so
deserving,” she said of adding the
playwright’s papers to the nation’s
leading literary repository. “One of
the other joys of doing this is so
many comedy writers have come
to the show, writers who work in
TV and cinema, and they all say the
same thing: ‘That’s why we exist:
Simon is the reason we are here.’ ”
After the library’s senior music
specialist, Mark Eden Horowitz,
finishes the task of cataloguing the
Simon trove, researchers will have
available a collection detailing a
remarkable theatrical portfolio.
The prolific Simon is considered
one of the most successful writers
Broadway ever produced, with
more than 30 plays and musicals
to his credit — not to mention his
voluminous Hollywood output —
over a career spanning decades.
“Barefoot in the Park,” “The Odd
Couple,” “Brighton Beach Mem-
oirs,” “The Sunshine Boys” all are
considered American classics, and
“Lost in Yonkers,” the touching
1991 family drama that earned him
a Pulitzer Prize, added a presti-
gious dimension to his shelves of
Tonys, his Kennedy Center Honors
and other awards.
The bonanza the library has
reaped includes multiple drafts
and script rewrites of all of these,
both typed and handwritten, and
hundreds more. Screenplays of
“The Goodbye Girl,” which won
Richard Dreyfuss an Oscar, and
“California Suite,” which won one
for Maggie Smith, are there, as
well as the librettos he contributed
to musicals such as “Promises,
Promises,” “Little Me,” “They’re
Playing Our Song” and “Sweet
Charity.”
“It’s everything I hoped it would
be and more,” said Horowitz,
whose job title doesn’t adequately
describe the depth of his expertise
in theater; his book, “The Letters
of Oscar Hammerstein II,” will be
published next month. “There are
a lot of photographs,” he added.
“There’s correspondence. One odd
thing is the notes that we found,
just on pieces of paper. One of
them that I will have on display
Monday is just written on a nap-
kin. You know, things that he
passed to someone, like to say,
‘Guess who’s hungry for dinner?’
The biggest surprise is the art-
work, which I had no hint about.
There are about 20 notepads or
sketchpads full of a wide variety of
paintings, drawings, cartoons, wa-
tercolors. Some of them are quite
good.”
SIMON FROM C1
With Neil Simon’s papers, library just got a lot funnier
PHOTOS BY NEIL SIMON COLLECTIONTOP LEFT: Some of the items donated to the Library of
Congress by Neil Simon’s widow, Elaine Joyce: one of
Simon’s Tony Awards, a pair of his glasses and a baseball
cap. BOTTOM LEFT: T here are also notepads and
sketchpads filled with watercolors and other artworks by
Simon. ABOVE: Also included are Simon’s handwritten
rewrites to the script of “The Odd Couple” for the 2005
revival starring Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane.“Neil really is for the people. This isAmerica’s library, and this is where hebelongs. He is America’s playwright.”
Elaine Joyce, Simon’s widow, on donating his work
to the Library of Congress