Eugene and Buddy, my college buddies.

Jonathan Silverman and Jason Alexander in Broadway Bound in 1986. 

By JIM COOK Jr.

Buddy Baxter

Hi, my name is Jim Cook Jr. and I play the role of Buddy Baxter in the upcoming play “Come Blow Your Horn” at OBSP.

To give you a brief overview, my character (Buddy) leaves his parents house to live with in his brother’s bachelor’s pad in the heart of Manhattan. He is every bit of a second child. Buddy relentlessly tries to appease everyone, he is very sensitive, and from the minute he walks into the apartment he wants to leave (weather or not he wants to admit it).

Though our production takes place in 2010, it does not loose any bit of the craft of Neil Simon’s comedy. And let me say, Mr. Simon is a comedic genius. Come Blow Your Horn is his first play written in 1961, and it laid the groundwork for plays like The Odd Couple, Brighton Beach Memoirs, and Broadway Bound (which I think was his parent’s reaction to Come Blow Your Horn)

Having said that, I want to take you on my journey with Neil Simon and his tactful touch of semi-autobiography. Buddy, in a sense, is Neil Simon, and this play is Simon’s way of getting out his observations of the comedy within his family.

But that is not where I begin. My story with playing the legendary writer began in January 2007 when I was only a recent high school graduate, just finishing up my fall semester as a freshman in a local community college. I had hardly picked up a pen in my life and did not know the first thing about being a writer. So at the time, I really was an incarnation of Buddy Baxter.

However, in 2007, I wasn’t playing Buddy Baxter, I was playing Eugene Jerome in Broadway Bound (written in 1986). This play is deep look at Simon’s family, and a more honest look at the family. Eugene is a writer, or on the brink of becoming one with his brother, and they are dying to move out of the house. The character of Eugene required a lot of life experience to encapsulate, and not having been a writer, it was very new to me. Eugene, unlike Buddy, is a more realized version of Simon, whereas Buddy is a more fun version of Simon.

In Come Blow Your Horn, the mother and the father characters are larger than life and get in outrageous shouting matches that will leave the audience in stitches.  And Simon probably took these characters from his actual family, only altering them a little bit.

So can you imagine what his living room must have felt like after his parents saw a performance of “Come Blow Your Horn” and realizing how much Simon made fun of the family? The answer to that question, I believe, comes about three quarters through the second act of Broadway Bound where the two brothers, Eugene and Stanley, premier a radio show with the family listening, that is about a slightly comedic embarrassing version of his actual parents. After the program is over, Jack (the father) erupts with frustration, eventually leaving his wife and family in the end with only two letters explaining himself.

This may have been a loose version of what happened when the family saw Come Blow Your Horn.

I feel like, in 2007, I was ready to play Buddy, and I feel like now, in 2010, I understand Eugene much more than I did. But that’s the showbiz, and maybe a little bit of Neil Simon’s place in my life. When I play Eugene I had just graduated from high school. Now playing Buddy (as of opening night) I will have just graduated college. 

But now I’m playing Buddy, and it’s been a pleasure backtracking. I have the inside of the character fleshed out from my experience playing Eugene. So now I have to start over and think “Eugene was Neil Simon years later. Not Buddy.” So I’m taking think from a writer’s stand point and thinking, as a much younger writer, who is Neil Simon. Because that’s who Buddy is.

Just a thought. I’ll leave you with a line from Broadway Bound that I always LOVED saying every night, but never understood until I became an actual writer myself. It comes after the Eugene admits that his inspiration for the radio show was based on his actual parents:

“There’s part of my head that makes me this nice, likeable, funny kid . . .  and there’s the other part, the part that writes, that’s an angry, hostile, real son of a bitch.”