Behind the curtain

Neil Simon never played down the emotional significance of Broadway Bound. It is his most honest, unromanticized look at his roots and it is both powerful and evocative.

But for all its exuberant humor, it is a comedy only in the sense that Chekhov meant Uncle Vanya to be seen as a comedy.

In a 1970 Newsweek cover story, Simon admitted that he had been relentless in his "pursuit of laughs," adding, "I used to get these horrible letters from people saying, ‘You don’t know how nice it is to go to the theater and be able to laugh without thinking.’ But humor isn’t anything if it can’t make you think and feel."

Since then, Simon transcended his humorist role, a process that culminated in his quasi-autobiographical trilogy: Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues and, finally, Broadway Bound. But only in the last play of the trilogy did he relax his gag reflex to let through some of the deeper and darker shades of his life and his art.

Simon was candid about his development as a writer: "I continue to learn the craft. In my later plays I began to provide a background, a context for the material. Brighton was set against the Depression and what was happening in Europe, Biloxi against World War II and Broadway is set in the midst of the war between my father and mother as their marriage disintegrated."

The hero Eugene, whom we first met as a girl-obsessed, diary-thumping adolescent in Brighton and later saw through boot camp in Biloxi Blues, is now out of the Army, back in the family house in Brighton Beach and on the verge of starting a career with his brother Stanley as a comedy writer at CBS for The Phil Silvers Show.

Broadway Bound‘s central image and emotional climax is a long-contemplated connection of mother and son, talking and dancing and, for just a moment, spiritually touching.

The play plainly meant something very special and not altogether comfortable for Simon. At the opening night of the preview run in Washington, he collapsed with what appeared to be a heart attack; the seizure was later diagnosed as a gastric disturbance.

"This was the easiest play of mine to write but the most difficult to watch," the playwright later said.

Frank Ferrante, who also directed the other Walnut Street Theatre plays in the trilogy, seems to have a private pipeline to Simon’s feelings. The Jerome family inhabits David Gordon’s two-story set (almost identical to the Brighton Beach home) the way it inhabits Simon’s memories.

The two levels are especially appropriate for Broadway Bound. On one level, the play is a lighthearted account of Eugene and his older brother, Stanley, teaming up to write comedy sketches for radio in the late 1940s. On the other, it is about the wrenching breakup of their parents’ 33-year marriage. It is as though a familiar Simon comedy were intertwined with an Arthur Miller play.

While we watch the brothers struggle with the sketch for CBS that will launch their joint career, we’re aware of their parents’ anguish. Jack Jerome, unfulfilled emotionally or intellectually in his marriage to Kate, has had an affair with a more "refined" woman. The troubled marriage echoes that of Kate’s father, Ben, who lives with the family, mouthing socialist rhetoric, while his estranged wife basks in the Florida sun.

The split vision makes Broadway Bound as much Kate’s play as Eugene’s, and Ellen Tobie does perhaps her finest acting in the role, mingling stereotypical Jewish mother concerns, a bit of caustic humor, some humiliation and a bit of rage at being "cast off." An important component of the play is the counterpoint between generations: The marriage of Jack and Kate is dissolving just at the moment when the boys experience their first flush of success.

For pure laughs, there are interludes in which Simon, with a nostalgic gusto reminiscent of Moss Hart’s Act One, dissects the ambitions and craft of aspiring show-biz comedy writers. When Eugene and Stanley finally get their break on CBS, their silly, period radio sketch is interpreted or misinterpreted differently by everyone who hears it, leading to a masterly delineation of how even writing intended for a mass audience begins with specific details and, before that, in the unexplored subconscious.

The play’s most rewarding role is not Eugene, as in the earlier plays of the trilogy, but his mother. After a first act in which she seems to be a short-tempered drudge, this long-suffering mother gradually transmutes shrewdness and emotional blackmail into fidelity and a kind of noble forbearance. That transformation is the basic movement of the play.

Jesse Bernstein plays the young Eugene with an infectious intensity, enthusiasm and air of innocence. Almost as stirring, in both conception and performance, is the character of Kate’s father, the unreconstructed if sometimes hypocritical Trotskyite, played with a matchless mixture of buried affection and shrewd comic timing by Lee Golden. Tom McCarthy, harried and guilty, brings a seedy honesty to the unfulfilled father.

Scott Greer is irrepressible as Eugene’s writing partner and brother. His mix of neurotic edge and propulsive energy is just right.

There are shadows of Our Town and Death of a Salesman‘s Willy Loman in the three generations of betrayals and disappointments, but Simon’s sensibility gives it light.

Simon does not attempt to do what Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams and Sam Shepard have done: create their own worlds and mesmerize viewers into them. Simon evokes a world very much like the viewers’ own and entices them into confronting their feelings. "Tender and funny" might be the best way to describe the show as a whole. Don’t expect to rupture your spleen laughing, but you can anticipate a frequent chuckle. Mostly, expect to be interested in the characters and charmed by the proceedings.

Broadway Bound
through Sunday
Walnut Street Theater
825 Walnut Street
Tickets: $10-$55
215-574-3550
www.wstonline.org