Neil Simon's Biloxi Blues

*Biloxi Blues* opened on Broadway in 1985 with Matthew Broderick as Eugene Jerome, the eighteen-year-old Brooklyn conscript, and Barry Miller as Arnold Epstein, the gentle, intelligent soldier who becomes the story's central figure. The semi-autobiographical play follows Army basic training at Keesler Field in 1945 — heat, mosquitoes, and first encounters with race. The plot turns on Epstein's power struggle with Sergeant Merwin J. Toomey, a middle-aged, hard-drinking platoon leader. In one memorable scene, Epstein forces Toomey to perform two hundred push-ups in front of the platoon. Frank Rich called it extremely funny and Simon's first serious attempt to examine his conscience as an artist and a Jew. The play won the Tony for Best Play. Miller won Best Featured Actor. It ran 524 performances and 12 previews, closing June 28, 1986. Mike Nichols directed the 1988 film, with Broderick and Miller reprising their roles and Christopher Walken as Toomey. The play is the second chapter in Simon's Eugene trilogy, following *Brighton Beach Memoirs* and preceding *Broadway Bound*. What it gave the Coast was this: Biloxi's name in front of a national audience and a fixed WWII military identity. The region had been a French colonial beachhead — Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville landed in 1699 and built Fort Maurepas, the first capital of French Louisiana. At Mississippi statehood in 1817, the coast comprised just 2.5 percent of the state's population, a frontier with Mediterranean cultural influences and ties to the wider world that the interior couldn't match. In the twentieth century, Keesler Air Force Base brought development. *Biloxi Blues* made that military transformation into a story people recognized. Keesler is still operational. The mosquitoes are still here too.