“Brighton Beach Memoirs” closed just one week after opening on Broadway.

New York Times / SARA KRULWICH

NEW YORK — Neil Simon was the crossover comedy king of Broadway and Hollywood for three decades, beginning when “Barefoot in the Park” and three other major shows overlapped in New York in the 1960s.

But comedy is changing on Broadway, and last Sunday one of Simon’s most-produced plays in the last 25 years, “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” became one of the biggest commercial flops on Broadway in recent memory. It closed a week after it opened, shocking many in the theater world, not least the writer himself.

“I’m dumbfounded,” Simon, 82, who has won a Pulitzer and three Tony awards, said in an interview. “After all these years, I still don’t get how Broadway works or what to make of our culture.”

What went wrong with “Brighton Beach Memoirs” is a case study in success and failure on Broadway today. There were no big stars like Jude Law in the current commercial hit “Hamlet,” there was no marketing campaign that framed the Simon play as a can’t-miss theatrical event and there was no wow factor that brought the period piece to life, like the breakneck pacing of the popular farce “Boeing-Boeing” last year. But the failure also reflects America’s evolving sense of humor and taste.

Broadway shows rarely close a week or less after opening. Those that do — like “Glory Days” in 2008 or “Carrie” in 1988 — were usually killed by reviews that were far worse than those for “Brighton Beach Memoirs.” It actually received good reviews.

But the play was shuttered because people, for whatever reason, didn’t want to see the Simon show about a Depression-era family laughing through the tears. The show cost $3 million to produce but never grossed more than $125,000 a week in ticket sales during preview performances — or 15 percent of the maximum possible — an amount that didn’t even cover running costs.

As for revivals of acclaimed American works like “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” they are hardly out of fashion with Broadway audiences. “South Pacific,” “Hair” and “West Side Story” are doing well, though musicals are stronger sellers than plays.

“There will always be an audience for a well-done revival of a great musical, but reviving a period-piece play now takes a special alchemy,” said Andre Bishop, artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, home to “South Pacific.” “A play revival needs to have a strong vision and to give people a reason why they should see it. What’s strange is that everyone I know thought this ‘Brighton Beach’ was wonderful.”

Simon’s signature has always been the well-written, straightforward punch line, but new and revived comedies have done best on Broadway lately when they’ve been dark, satiric and outrageously narcissistic. The recent revivals of the plays “Boeing-Boeing,” “Speed-the-Plow” and “The Norman Conquests” took flight because of fast-paced timing but also had frissons of fear and panic just beneath the surface humor. A mix of comedy and pain also proved potent for the original play “August: Osage County,” while two other new plays, “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” and “The Little Dog Laughed,” were sharp satires of political terrorism and Hollywood.

While reality shows like “American Idol” and forensic dramas like “NCIS” dominate television today, popular comedies like the traditionally plotted sitcom “Two and a Half Men” and the character-driven “Desperate Housewives” also share sharply written dialogue and recognizable modern characters like those found in “God of Carnage.”

“It’s clear from the ascendancy of certain types of comedy, like the trend exemplified by Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen, Steve Carell, ‘The 40 Year-Old Virgin,’ ‘Knocked Up,’ that what audiences are seeking in humor is getting more raw and edgy than Simon’s work,” said Matthew Maguire, a playwright who is director of the theater program at Fordham University.

Popular culture has also developed a bigger-is-better, entertainment-as-event attitude that runs counter to the ethos of the typical Simon play. Stadium-arena rock concerts, the “Harry Potter” and “Twilight” book and film series, the days-long cable news coverage of Michael Jackson’s death, the ever-increasing punch of season finales on television dramas — these do not have equivalents in the Simon canon and are not staples of Broadway.

The producers of “Brighton Beach” hoped it too would become an event once the play was running in repertory with its companion by Simon, “Broadway Bound,” about the same family a decade later. Two earlier plays in the past few years succeeded in part because they pursued that strategy.

The biggest commercial theatrical “event” on Broadway recently was last season’s revival of “The Norman Conquests,” a trilogy of British comedies with interlocking plots and characters; all three opened at the same time, delighting critics, though it was not ultimately profitable. The “Brighton Beach” producers decided to open “Broadway Bound” a month later, Cromer said, in order to give “Brighton Beach” a chance to build an audience and to spread out the financial obligations.

“Brighton Beach” may have suffered by forgoing another traditional strategy of popular entertainment: It had no big stars. The two plays were to have largely the same cast, led by the Emmy-winning actress Laurie Metcalf as Kate Jerome, the head of the family — based loosely on Simon’s own family — at the center of the plays. The producers and director said it was necessary to cast strong actors for parts that require dramatic and comic range and that, if done poorly, can edge into ethnic stereotype.

“If you want a star, your options are often narrowed in finding a perfect person for the part,” Cromer said in an interview.

Simon also found himself up against both a bevy of Broadway plays this fall and an economy in which theatergoers are being choosy about how many $100-a-seat shows they are willing to pay for.