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In the play Brighton Beach Memoirs, the father says, "If you don’t have a problem, you wouldn’t live in this house," and that’s no joke!
Memoirs is one of Neil Simon’s more serious plays. It is an autobiographical portrait of the artist as a young man. We are invited to watch family resentments grow and angers flare through the eyes of a canny adolescent who already has learned how to translate trouble into high humor.
Simon mixes comedy and drama without — for the most part — either force-feeding the jokes or milking the tears. The seven members of the Jerome family are all appealing in some way. Even though Simon is trying to come to terms with his less-than-rosy Depression-era adolescence, he looks back not with anger but with an affection that is too warm to be false.
The plot is pleasantly straightforward: Eugene, the 15-year-old hero played by Jesse Bernstein, lives in crowded, lower-middle-class circumstances. His household not only contains his father (Tom McCarthy), mother (Ellen Tobie) and older brother (Scott Greer), but also the mother’s widowed sister Kate (Lisbeth Barlett) and her two daughters Nora (Jennifer Alimonti) and Laurie (Alyse Wojciechowski).
There are the family meals, including a dinner of liver and cabbage ("the ultimate tragedy," says Eugene). There is the bitter but heretofore unexpressed sibling hostility between Eugene’s mother Blanche and aunt Kate that erupts in the second act. There are the scenes in which the more worldly Stanley contributes luridly to Gene’s sex education.
Finally, there is the distant Nazi menace, brought home to Brighton Beach with the news that some Polish family members who have escaped Hitler will soon be arriving in America in need of shelter.
Simon uses the family’s miseries to raise such enduring issues as sibling resentments, guilt-ridden parent-child relationships and the hunger for dignity in a poverty-stricken world. When the bone-weary father, a garment-district cutter working two jobs, plods home as wearily as Willy Loman, we find real, eloquently stated pain. Act 1 reassures the viewers, as most of the family’s problems, moral dilemmas and conflicts are neatly resolved.
No matter how difficult the goings-on around him, Eugene is usually ready with a wisecrack, and he records those gags in the composition book that is the repository of his first literary effort — his "memoirs."
There is a crisis on every front: Blanche’s boyfriend is discovered to be an alcoholic, her daughter Nora wants to leave high school to accept a dubious offer to enter show business, Eugene’s older brother Stanley is about to lose his job and, to top it all off, the father, Jack, has lost his after-hours job and suffers a heart attack. While the family is dealing with its many misfortunes, Eugene is dealing with adolescence — mostly the terrible agony of his awakening sexual appetites, better known as lust.
While some of the Jewish-mother, puberty and food jokes are overdone, others are dead-on, as the observation that certain "illness" words must always be whispered in a Jewish home.
Eugene is Simon’s autobiographical stand-in — an alternately perplexed and perceptive observer with composition book always at the ready. Acted by Bernstein with a marvelous combination of non-self-conscious precocity and downright amazement, Eugene is the play’s narrator and commentator, a one-man Greek chorus in brown knickers and scuffed sneakers.
The image of this resilient hero has the rough edges papered over. He is the unelected slave, the permanent gofer, the "knickerbocker kid" on call for two Jewish families, and if each day demands 16 trips to the grocer’s, so be it. Always with a joke, the image is opaque and the true feelings of the real character are obscured rather than revealed.
While Bernstein thoroughly captivates the audience, others in the cast make significant contributions, in particular McCarthy as the father and Greer as a very mature-looking 18-year-old brother. Wojciechowski and Alimonti are especially poignant as the young sisters.
Eugene observes presciently at the outset, "This is going to be one heck of a day." Simon proves his bright alter ego abundantly right in this odd, funny and quirky play. The cast is first-rate, and is directed with great sensitivity by Frank Ferrante. Brighton Beach Memoirs is a full evening, a funny evening, but most of all, a thoroughly rewarding evening.
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Brighton Beach Memoirs
Walnut Street Theatre
825 Walnut St.
Through March 2
Tickets $10-$50
215-574-3550
www.wstonline.org
