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| | Email this article • Print this article | 'Yonkers'- serviceable,
but not exceptional
by Lisa Traiger
Arts Correspondent
It's been a decade since Theater J artistic director Ari Roth staged a Neil Simon play - and that one was a ringer, Simon's take on Anton Chekhov's The Good Doctor. This most produced of American playwrights is a no-brainer for most Jewish theaters.
But Theater J, the Washington DC Jewish Community Center's award-winning theater, isn't most Jewish theaters. Typically, it's where audiences can expect to be stretched and pushed, prodded into looking at political, social, religious, economic and ethical issues in a different, even controversial, light, most often with a distinctly Jewish sensibility.
This fall, the company, which faced protests last season with Sandra Bernhardt's fractious pre-election diatribes and Caryl Churchill's incendiary Seven Jewish Children, seems intent on mending fences in the Jewish community by programming Simon's bittersweet "dramady" Lost in Yonkers, which runs through Nov. 29 in the Aaron and Cecile Goldman Theater.
Simon, with his yuk-yuk one-liners and his sweetly poignant plotlines, mines a certain kind of American Jewish character type: poor, hardworking, quick-witted and sharp-tongued, and always sincere and self-effacing when it's a boy-man Simon prototype.
Long America's most popular playwright (produced more frequently than Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and a slew of other prominent dramatists), Neil Simon is experiencing a banner year: Major revivals of two of three of his autobiographical coming-of-age plays - Brighton Beach Memoirs and Broadway Bound - hit Broadway this month.
Here in D.C., director Jerry Whiddon's rendering of Simon's 1991 play, which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama that year, is more laughter-through-tears than old-fashioned melodrama, though there's a touch of that, too. The two Kurnitz brothers, 13-year-old Arty and 15-year-old Jay, find themselves bunking with their hard-as-steel grandmother in her Yonkers living room after their mother dies and their father goes on the road to purchase scrap metal.
The boys, Kyle Schliefer as Jay and Max Talisman as Arty, with their Laurel-and-Hardy builds, recall a young Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, with their wise-cracking shticks and mischief making, especially at the expense of their mean-as-mud grandmother. It's 1942, there's a war on, and Grandma (a sour Tana Hicken, plain-faced in a steel-wool bun and worn house dress) emits not even a smidgen of love for her grandsons, or anyone else.
The rest of her decidedly dysfunctional family includes the boys' father, Eddie (Kevin Bergen, disappointingly lightweight in this role as an unloved son, still mourning his wife's death); his small-time gangster brother, Louie (more vividly portrayed by tightly wound Marcus Kyd); and sisters Gert (Lise Bruneau, a cipher who appears only in the second act) and Bella (a luminescent, but redoubtable Holly Twyford). The play hinges on Bella, the boys' 35-year-old developmentally delayed aunt. Child-like but wise beyond her family's expectations, she has a bubbly innocence covering deep yearning.
Twyford transforms this woman-child into an exceptionally vibrant character. Forgetful and simple-minded, she ultimately wields underhanded power in her unforgiving mother's drab household. The boys, observers in this family drama, watch Bella's coming of age under her mother's immutable, hard gaze.
Scenic designer Daniel Conway's sepia-toned living room with its dark mahogany furniture and spare knickknacks, sometimes glows a dusty gold under Daniel MacLean Wagner's lights. Misha Kachman's period costumes, simple dresses for the women, britches for the boys and suits for the men, could be a little more worn for authenticity's sake.
Lost in Yonkers is among Simon's darker plays, for his grandmother character turns upside down the typical expectations of a Jewish mother. This one never cracks a smile, grimaces when her grandsons dutifully kiss her cheek and wields her wooden cane with terrifying precision.
As this grandma, Hicken makes this dried-up, old woman the power center of the family, her harsh German accent a recollection of her hardscrabble childhood in the old country. The rest of the cast has varying success maintaining their New York accents throughout both acts.
Theater J's production rightfully wrings out all of Simon's sentiment and, for those who love an evening that provides both a few good laughs and easy tears, Lost in Yonkers fills the bill. Bring a hanky: Simon knows how to play for laughs and tug at heartstrings. When Theater J steps into territory oft-trod by other theaters as it does here, the result is serviceable, though not exceptional work.
Lost in Yonkers is onstage through Nov. 29 at the WDCJCC in the District. Tickets, $30-$55, are available at 800-494-TIXS or www.boxofficetickets.com.
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