April 1, 1985

THEATER REVIEW

IN 'BILOXI BLUES,' SIMON RECAPTURES HIS YOUTH

By Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

In ''Biloxi Blues,'' Neil Simon's new hit play that opened last week on Broadway, it is 1943, and Eugene Morris Jerome, the young hero played by Matthew Broderick, is spending his stint in the wartime Army, trying to grow up and become a writer. Eugene sees himself as an outsider, an invisible witness to the hectic events of the world around him, and he is constantly scribbling down his observations of his fellow soldiers in a little marbled-cover composition book, feeling ''a little ashamed for betraying their secret and private thoughts.'' Instead of serving on the battlefield, he will go on to work for a G.I. newspaper, but while this will cause him to ''suffer pangs of guilt because my career was enhanced by World War II,'' he will have found his vocation. He will indeed grow up and become a writer. He will grow up and become Neil Simon.

Like Fran,cois Truffaut's Antoine Doinel, like Tennessee Williams's Tom Wingfield, Eugene is intended as a portrait of the author as a young man. Yet if many of the events and emotions in ''Biloxi Blues'' and its companion piece, ''Brighton Beach Memoirs,'' were taken almost verbatim from Mr. Simon's own life - the job on a service newspaper, a humiliating experience with prejudice in the Army, a very funny encounter with a prostitute - they are also imaginative transactions, the efforts of a mature writer, in the playwright's words, to ''force memory'' and in doing so, recapture and reassess the past.

''I think you discover things by writing - it can be therapeutic,'' says Mr. Simon, ''and I wanted to know how this extremely shy, not enormously well-educated boy came to do what I consider a very hard thing to do - write plays. I wanted to see how I became the person I am. I seem to be, in my own mind, a very unlikely candidate for success. It's like when I see Joan Collins on the Johnny Carson show, I say, 'Yeah, she was made to be on the Johnny Carson show.' But when I see myself there, I say, 'What are you doing there? - you belong in the Bronx playing stickball.' I don't feel like that all the time - I can go to an opening night and deal with all the cameras, but then I go home and I'm depressed somehow, because I don't understand how this all happened.''

Replacing Reality With Dreams

The acclaim that his 22 plays and more than a dozen movies have given him, says Mr. Simon, has done much to alleviate his shyness and diminish his sense of invisibility, but at 57, he continues to have a lot in common with this younger self he calls Eugene - a name chosen, he explains, for its ethnic resonance and its blandness, the sort of muted name that would mean ''you're never going to play on the Yankees.''

As a young boy, whose parents were constantly fighting, Mr. Simon used to sit alone in the dark in his room, listening to the radio, removing ''reality and replacing it with my dreams''; and to this day, he still loves to retreat to the private world of his imagination. For him, going to the office and shutting the door is like entering a time machine or going to a movie - it takes him to another place. Like Eugene, he still chastises himself for being a witness and not taking a more active part in the world; and like Eugene, he still loves the actual process of writing and the pleasures it affords. The lovely, tactile sense of filling up thinly lined notebooks with prose; the cathartic release of expressing - or confessing - unconscious thoughts through surrogate spokesmen; the self-knowledge gained by reinventing the past through words.

In a sense, certainly, Mr. Simon's best work has always been acutely autobiographical - either translations of his own experiences or wished-for scenarios played out on the stage or screen. He will occasionally write something wholly diversionary like ''Murder by Death'' in order to take a holiday from himself, but as far as his serious work is concerned, he says he's gotten into the most trouble when he's strayed into unfamiliar territory - as he did with ''The Star-Spangled Girl,'' a comedy about two left-wing politicos who fall in love with a reactionary girl.

Mr. Simon's very first play, ''Come Blow Your Horn,'' portrayed the efforts of himself and his brother to leave home. ''Barefoot in the Park'' commemorated his early years of marriage to his first wife, Joan; and ''Chapter Two'' dealt with the guilt he felt following her death in 1973. ''The Odd Couple'' was based on the experiences of Mr. Simon's brother, Danny, and a friend; and ''The Sunshine Boys,'' on older comics he knew from his days as a gag writer.

Exploring the Darker Side

Curiously enough, Mr. Simon refers to all the fictionalized versions of himself as ''Eugene,'' as though his oeuvre formed a single, continuous memoir - ''when I started writing about Eugene he was 21 in 'Come Blow Your Horn,' and in 'Barefoot in the Park,' Eugene was 26 or 27'' - and he points out that these characters all share ''my humor, my attitude in dealing with things.'' As he's gotten older, though, he says his perspective has become clearer, and a change, too, has taken place in his treatment of ''Eugene'': whereas the early plays treated the ''lighter, farcical'' sides of the hero and his dilemmas, the last two works have used humor to explore somewhat darker regions.

In ''Brighton Beach,'' Mr. Simon says he tried to deal with the fact that his mother was a wonderful woman who also happened to be a bigot; and in ''Biloxi Blues,'' he addresses such matters as his own paralyzing shyness with girls, his guilt about not actually fighting in World War II, his Jewishness, and his failure to stand up, sufficiently, for a friend who was the victim of anti-Semitism. He is currently thinking about writing a third play about Eugene's apprenticeship as a writer - a play that would be set during the years he worked for television with Carl Reiner, Sid Caesar and Phil Silvers. The role of Eugene, in all likelihood, would again be played by Matthew Broderick.

In playing Eugene twice already, Mr. Broderick has not only been re- enacting Mr. Simon's coming of age as a writer, but has also been growing up in front of audiences himself: he was 21 when he got the part in ''Brighton Beach''; last week he turned 23. ''Brighton Beach,'' of course, was the show that galvanized his career - since then, he's made such movies as ''WarGames'' and ''Max Dugan Returns'' - and for his portrayal of Eugene, Mr. Broderick draws upon some of his own memories of being an aspiring actor. ''I went through a long time of dying to be an actor,'' he says, recalling his days as a young teen- ager at the Walden School. ''But I was afraid to get in front of people. I'd picked a school that had a great theater, but it took two years for me to audition. I remember that crazy ambition, though, and Eugene has that, too, with his writing.''

'It's Useful to Watch Neil'

Though he says he tries to forget that he's playing a character based on Mr. Simon, Mr. Broderick observes that ''it's useful to watch Neil and know about him.'' More important, perhaps, is the instinctive affinity that the actor feels with Eugene: his sense of ''playing both sides of the fence, so people will like me''; his awareness of language and inflection.

As played by Mr. Broderick, Eugene seems the model image of a young writer or what an older writer would like to remember his younger self as - vulnerable but spirited, appealing in his good-natured idealism; and when Mr. Simon sees him up there on the stage, he can't help but be reminded of the young man he used to be.

''It's not physical so much,'' he says, ''but that Matthew says so many of the things exactly the way I would say them. I think also it's the way he does the humor - he never tries to be funny; he says the lines with great earnestness. Somehow I would not feel I'd quite accomplished my job fully if he were the only one who could play the role, but it's hard to escape Matthew's craftsmanship and charm. There's an innocence about him that was a part of me.''