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04/28/2022 12:01 AMAll parents leave their marks on their children and grandchildren. For immigrant families, perhaps, these marks are sometimes bigger and more permanent.
Neil Simon explores this with both humor and sympathy in Lost in Yonkers, his Pulitzer-Prize winning play now at Hartford Stage through Sunday, May 1. This story draws on Simon’s own history and family to some extent. As was common in his later works, he combined some gag lines with more drama.
The central character is Grandma Kurnitz, the stern and unemotional matriarch of four children. Her experiences as a Jew in Germany during the late 19th century, her immigration to America with her husband and children, and the deaths of two of her children have hardened her heart. She has survived by being strong, unemotional, and controlling.
This affects her four adult children in multiple ways. Each found a way to survive in the household that was ruled often by fear and manipulation, and each was left with deep scars.
The play opens with two boys—Arty, who is 13, and Jay, who is 15—waiting in their grandmother’s apartment while their very nervous father (Eddie) keeps going into the bedroom to talk to his mother and then comes back out to make sure the boys are behaving perfectly. Finally, he tells them the purpose of their rare visit. Their mother’s long illness and death caused him to go into debt. He can repay the debt within a year by taking a job as a traveling salesman in the south. He is asking his mother to let the two boys live with her and their aunt for that time.
Grandma emerges and, while never agreeing to the arrangement, the boys move in. Living with them (the family lives above the candy store they run) is their Aunt Bella, who seems to be mentally slow. In fact, Grandma constantly threatens Bella with being put in “the home.”
The play covers the next months as their father writes them from his route and they manage to survive and perhaps even melt, just a little, their grandma’s heart.
The two teens have seen their mother die of cancer and need compassion and love. From Grandma, they instead get rules and lectures about being “tough” and “surviving.” Perhaps these are good lessons, but they are sure to scar them just as their father, aunts, and uncle have been scarred. As part of her toughening the boys, when Jay works in the store, Grandma docks his pay for items she says were stolen but that were actually taken by her and hidden.
Perhaps the best example of her philosophy is that while she could easily pay off the debt so the boys could stay with their father, it’s not even considered by anyone in the family.
It is clear Grandma has little love or respect to give any of her children. She views their father as weak and thinks less of both Bella and the other sister Gert. Only her son Louie gets some grudging respect. He never appeared afraid of her and is now a low-level gangster, on the run.
In this production, co-directed by Marsha Mason and Hartford Stage Artistic Producer Rachel Alderman, you never quite sense the terror that the family has for Grandma. Yes, there is nervousness around her and anger, but not terror.
Hartford Stage has assembled a top-notch cast for this production with Mason as Grandma. It can be a difficult role because at some point, we must see at least a small crack in her hard heart. It is also an unsympathetic role; the audience may understand why she is the way she is, but it will have difficulty feeling compassion for her. It is so obvious how she has crippled each of her children.
Mason, with her voice, posture, and gestures, doesn’t try to soften the character. She is stern and reserved with erect posture and a voice that reveals not a trace of warmth. Jeff Skowron, as Eddie the father, starts as the nervous Nellie his mother has made him but portrays the warmth and devotion to his sons in the brief scenes of writing letters to them from the road.
Andrea Syglowski imbues Bella with just the right touch of enthusiasm and desperation. She makes you long for her to have a happy ending, though the audience recognizes that is impossible. As Louie, Michael Nathanson also gives the character a touch of sadness. He survived his mother the best, but you see how emotionally stunted he is.
Gabriel Amoroso as Arty (the younger brother) and Hayden Bercy as Jay (the older one) are good. If there is any complaint, it is that they look and sound younger than their supposed ages of 13 and 15 ½. I would have thought them 10 and 12 at the most. At times Bercy rushed his lines, which made it harder to understand them, and both boys occasionally stepped on their laughs.
Lauren Helpern has created a realistic representation of the apartment complete with period touches such as doilies on the back of the sofa. Both the costumes by An-Lin Dauber and lighting by Aja M. Jackson are good.
For tickets, visit HartfordStage.org.