Surviving Hard Times


Neil Simon’s "Brighton Beach Memoirs," comes from a kinder, gentler playwright, one less harsh, less dark about love and marriage and human beings than the fellow who wrote "Sweet Charity," say, or "Plaza Suite." This is Simon with a wobbly kind of soft spot for adolescence, and New York, and family and growing up Jewish.

But that growing up Jewish has its dark side, too. It’s suffused with self mockery, cultural isolation, bitterness and, of course, a mother. Kate (M.J. Hartell) cleans constantly (it’s genetic. Her Russian grandmother swept the house clean just as a pogrom rushed her out of it), makes spaghetti sauce with ketchup, cooks liver to death and persists in serving lima beans with dreadful gastric consequences for our hero and narrator, Eugene Morris Jerome (Ben Grinberg).

Eugene is 15. He wants to pitch for the Yankees — although he figures that will be hard for someone named Eugene. He should be a Joey or a Frankie. He also wants to see his cousin Nora (Keilly Gillen McQuail), who lives with Eugene, his brother, their parents, his mother’s sister and her two offspring, one of them being the nubile Nora, naked. Almost as much as he wants to see Nora naked he wants privacy, which is hard to come by in this cramped Brooklyn apartment, a place with exhausted upholstery, antimacassars, a head shot of Claudette Colbert for the stage-struck Nora in the girls’ room and a screen door stage right allowing people to blow in and out of this otherwise hermetic world.

The family is right on the edge. Eugene’s dad, Jack (Joe Harding), needs two jobs to keep (terrible) food on the table. Kate’s widowed sister, Blanche (Susan Abrams), is swamped by helplessness and Hitler is entering Poland, an event that threatens the lives of relatives.

Things go from fractious to devastating as old grievances and new horrors surface. And though the audience laughs at the jokes, the jokes are not funny so much as reflexive, a means of getting on to the next moment. Staying alive. Taking another breath. This is no comedy.

But "Brighton Beach Memoirs" is pretty entertaining, even though the playwright’s wheels run hard, and the plot concatenates in a false way. Some of the actors, though, get us over these jarring places, particularly Harding, who knows how to underdo it, and Abrams, who creeps up on her role and surprises us all.

 


"Brighton Beach Memoirs" plays at TheatreWorks in New Milford through May 26. For tickets, call

860-350-6863.

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