The audience at the Neil Simon Theatre really was having an awfully good time. Scarcely a line of Biloxi Blues had gone by without eliciting a wave of appreciative laughter or applause. For my part, I sat beside my friend who has a soft spot for Neil Simon, feeling like a killjoy and a snob, wishing that I could find some shred of honesty or wit or breadth of comic vision in this play that seemed to be making everyone else so warm and jolly.
I did eventually double up with laughter, once, late in the play. A hush had fallen on the audience. It was a tense moment: some unidentified member of the platoon had been discovered committing an unnatural sexual act in the latrine. Perched on his foot-locker, smoothing down the pages of his journal, Eugene M. Jerome—the hero of Neil Simon’s play—looked troubled. Above him, on an upper bunk sat Arnold Epstein, the brilliant but self-destructive Jew who was always getting racial flak from his commanding officer and bunkmates.
A terrible thing had happened: Eugene’s private notebook—in which he wrote down all his secret thoughts and feelings in preparation for becoming a writer—had been found and read by his bunkmates, which was awkward in itself, for now each one knew exactly what Eugene thought of him. But also—which was far, far worse—everyone now also knew that Arnold was probably a homosexual, for in his memoirs Eugene had recorded suspicions to that effect. Eugene hadn’t
