On Stage - Lost In Yonkers Full Press Page
Washington Post
Joie de Twyford brings 'Lost in Yonkers' home
By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 30, 2009
Holly Twyford might not be able to settle all the globe's concerns. But she sure knows how to hold the world of a play in her hands.
Her latest demonstration of inordinate control and instinct and vitality is as the intellectually simple Bella in Theater J's excellent revival of Neil Simon's "Lost in Yonkers." The role of a woman who is still partly a child has all sorts of inherent pitfalls, the most prominent being the ease with which an actress playing one can lapse into unctuousness. If an audience knows that she knows her behavior is meant to evoke sympathy or pity, then all is indeed lost in Yonkers.
That never occurs in Twyford's portrait of an eternal daughter, a woman who over the course of the comedy begins, like "The Glass Menagerie's" Laura Wingfield, to tug at her mother's suffocating yoke. We're aware from the very start that something is off about Bella -- she weirdly misremembers events and speaks indoors in an outdoor voice -- but the actress creates in her the touchstone for us that Simon intends. Despite her limitations, Bella's joie de vivre is the purest expression of optimism in the play, and Twyford embraces it as something entirely natural and, as a consequence, happy-making.
She and the rest of the extremely effective cast are fortunate to have had the services of Jerry Whiddon, who has shown time and again that he is a real actors' director, capable of eliciting from performers the maximum range of their characters' personality. In this instance, for the crucial parts of the grandchildren who come to live with Bella and her ice-cold German-born mother (a formidable Tana Hicken), he has found two teenage actors who reveal that they can compete with the best of the grown-ups on the city's stages.
As the younger boy, Max Talisman -- so right a few years ago as the lonely son in Studio Theatre's "Caroline, or Change" -- delivers Arty's precocious comebacks with a truly funny air of mischief. And the terrific Kyle Schliefer, playing older brother Jay, brings palpable leading-man appeal to the challenging role of a sensitive kid who's forced to navigate the treacherous turf of his grandmother's ancient hurts and grievances. Lise Bruneau, meanwhile, makes the most of the evening's smallest role, creating a figure of compelling warmth out of Bella's insecure sister Gert, the one so anxiety-ridden she can't breathe properly.
Reviving "Lost in Yonkers" is not by a long shot the riskiest undertaking in the history of Theater J, which time and again has been willing to go its own way. Fine work, though, is fine work, and the production -- enhanced by Misha Kachman's World War II-era costumes and Daniel Conway's rendering of a flat of the early '40s, blandly outdated in absolutely the correct manner -- gives conventionality a good name.
What's also revealed, perhaps inadvertently, are the obvious seams in the 1991 play. Although "Yonkers" won Simon his only Pulitzer, it's a middle-range effort. While his feisty plays of the 1960s, like "Barefoot in the Park" and "The Odd Couple," taught Broadway audiences new things about the rhythms of stand-up and sketch comedy, he seemed content in his later works merely to satisfy audience tastes for nostalgia and sentimentality. This did produce some warm memory and character-driven plays such as "Brighton Beach Memoirs" -- now being revived on Broadway -- and to a lesser extent, "Yonkers," even as the formula became less and less successful over time.
Set in 1942 in the apartment of Hicken's Grandma, "Yonkers" is about an emotionally frigid matriarch and the damage her embittered refusal to nurture has inflicted on her children, all disappointments to her: Bella, Gert, the thuggish Louie (Marcus Kyd) and the nebbishy Eddie (Kevin Bergen), Arty and Jay's father. The buildup to Grandma's first entrance is very funny, making it sound as if we're about to come face to face with Lord Voldemort's own mother: Schliefer and Talisman sit on a convertible sofa, quaking with anxiety.
Hicken envelops Grandma in a brittle shell of perpetual contempt. She's not quite the monster Irene Worth made of her on Broadway, and she has an impossible task late in the evening, when out of her own mouth has to come the explanation for her grudging maternal nature. But as with the rest of the cast, she finds a convincing way to knit this woman into the story of a family that explodes the mythology of the immigrant American dream.
Twyford does something more: She makes clumsy, embarrassing Bella a figure of heart and worth. Every second with her becomes a moment of great matter. Which goes a long way toward making this well-acted and -directed evening matter, too.
Lost in Yonkers
by Neil Simon. Directed by Jerry Whiddon. Lighting, Daniel MacLean Wagner; sound, Neil McFadden; dialect coach, Christine Hirrel. About 2 hours 15 minutes. Through Nov. 29 at the D.C.
Washington Jewish Week
'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.
Washington Times
THEATER: Neil Simon's wit finds a home in 'Yonkers'Rate this story
★★★½
Theater J has right touch with dysfunctional family
By Jayne Blanchard
Theater J continues its strong season with its first-ever production of a full-length Neil Simon play, 1991's "Lost in Yonkers." Headed by the incandescent Holly Twyford as the developmentally disabled Bella and a rigorous performance by Tana Hicken as the formidable Grandma, the company delivers a memory play with sharpness and emotional depth.
Director Jerry Whiddon keeps the schmaltz — the playwright's besetting flaw — to a minimum, taking pains to maintain the dramatic comedy's period feel (it is set in the 1940s) without resorting to retro nostalgia. Daniel Conway's sepia-toned set, with its flowered rugs and crocheted doilies on all the furniture, is inviting but also suggests a household that is tightly run and tightly wound.
The subject matter in "Lost in Yonkers" doesn't give you the warm fuzzies, either. The cash-strapped widower Eddie (Kevin Bergin) has to go on the road selling scrap metal and is forced to leave his young sons Arty (Max Talisman) and Jay (Kyle Schliefer) with Grandma, who is not making hot cocoa and cookies for anyone anytime soon.
The family walks on eggshells around this steely and unyielding German immigrant — not just the childlike Bella, but also the gangster son Louis (a jaunty and menacing Marcus Kyd) and the other daughter, Gert (the underused but effective Lise Bruneau), who is so damaged by her upbringing that she has developed a gasping speech impediment.
"Lost in Yonkers" is a coming-of-age play about Arty and Jay learning not only how to survive but also to appreciate dysfunctional family members — especially when times are hard. Arty gets most of the zippy one-liners, which Mr. Talisman works like an adenoidal Rodney Dangerfield, while Mr. Schliefer's Jay affectingly embodies the play's emotional and sensitive side.
Yet, "Lost in Yonkers" also centers on Bella's struggle for independence from her controlling mother and her demand to be treated like an adult despite her mental disabilities. Miss Twyford portrays Bella as a potent, unrestrained force of nature — openhearted and full of fears but more alive than her mother ever will be.
Whether she's melting into a hug with her nephews, sitting on the couch chewing her fingernails or telling off Grandma with sweetness and steel, you can't help but be drawn to Bella.
Or Miss Hicken's Grandma. This is a wily performance, from the lemony grimaces she gives every time someone leans in to kiss her cheek to the way she wields her cane like a weapon. She plays not just the meanness, but the hard grief and neediness that twisted Grandma into who she is today. Although they were left behind in a strange neighborhood with a strange family, it is not Arty and Jay who are lost in Yonkers.
WHAT: "Lost in Yonkers" by Neil Simon
Metro Weekly - 5 Stars!
Masterpieces
Theater J's Lost in Yonkers should be greatly applauded while Adding Machine is an incredible night of theater
by Tom Avila
Published on October 29, 2009
Children should be seen and not heard. For many of us this was the general house rule growing up. An attitude held by grandmothers and elder statesman aunts who had already raised their own children and didn't need to hear the same complaints and questions all over again. They had done their time.
Such is the attitude of the iron matriarch helming the family of Neil Simon's Lost in Yonkers. This is the first full-length Simon play to appear at Theater J's Aaron & Cecile Goldman Theater and it deserves a warm and enthusiastic welcome.
There's a lovely sentimentality at work here, a wonderfully broad, almost romantic notion of family. A family you may well recognize. The uncle no one talks about. The aunt everyone talks about. The grandmother people talk about, but very softly to make sure she doesn't hear you. (Of course, she always hears you.)
Lost in YonkersIt's into this nest of family battles, also known as Grandma's apartment, that Eddie (Kevin Bergen) is trying to drop his boys. Jay (Kyle Schliefer) and Arty (Max Talisman) need somewhere to stay while Eddie hits the road in an effort to pay off the debts he incurred for his late wife's medical care.
But Grandma (Tana Hicken) is not convinced. Her life is not designed to be a grandmother. She spends her days taking care of the family store. At night she listens to the news on the radio. On Sunday she rests. There is no room.
Pulling for the boys is Eddie's good-hearted but mentally impaired sister Bella (Holly Twyford), who lives with her mother and longs for other companionship.
The peculiar family tree is rounded out by an uncle who might be in the mob and an aunt whose physical ailments, like Bella's mental ones, are rumored to be the result of their immigrant mother's meanness.
Those who saw Hicken and Twyford in Studio Theatre's Road to Mecca will be delighted to see the two paired once more. They create a fascinating and utterly believable mother-daughter dynamic that offers the show a solid foundation on which to build.
Twyford is singularly outstanding in the role of Bella. This is one of those delicately balanced characters that, in the wrong hands, could topple into hollow clowning. But Twyford holds a firm line and imbues Bella with warmth, sensitivity and a brilliant sense of truth.
Schliefer and Talisman bring fine humor and a great maturity to the stage. Schliefer has a particularly tough load to carry, asked to balance a bit more on his back than the comic punches of Talisman's Arty. He has a real connection to his fellow actors and it makes his performance more than simply funny. It is memorable.
Lost in Yonkers is a show that should be seen and heard and greatly, greatly applauded.
A CurtainUp Review
Lost In Yonkers
By Susan Davidson
You just want to make me miserable because someone in Germany made you miserable.— Artie to his Grandmother.
________________________________________
It's easy to understand, after seeing Theater J's admirable production of Lost in Yonkers why some critics dismiss playwright Neil Simon's sit-com style of humor and why some audiences still go for this brand of old-fashioned schtick. It is entertaining, amusing and as melodramatic as a schmaltzy song, albeit one with some real pathos.
Grandma, born in Germany, is now living in a Yonkers apartment over her ice cream shop. The apartment is stifling —- not just because it pre-dates air conditioning but visually and emotionally. The walls, the rugs, the chairs are an ugly brown and Grandma's mood is always dark if not vicious.
Injured in Berlin in her youth and emotionally damaged after the deaths of two of her four children, Grandma is incapable of love. No one leaves her presence unscathed. Tana Hicken tackles the role with grim fortitude. As her always childlike daughter Bella, described by one of her siblings as being "closed for repairs," Holly Twyford is heart-breakingly simple minded, yet clear in her emotions. She has never been on the receiving end of love but she certainly knows how to give it.
While Bella is able to maintain her Bronx accent, Tana Hicken's German-American wafts in and out. It's an annoyance but a small one. Both actresses are very well known and highly regarded in Washington where they've been paired before and no doubt will be again— especially after their performances here.
Some of the best moments come at the end of the play when Grandma is confronted by the grandsons she has been forced to take in while her son and their widowed father works at his well paid job as a traveling saleman - so that he can pay off debts incurred during his wife's fatal disease. As Artie, the 16-year-old younger grandson, Max Talismanstrikes poses as he moves about the stage like a flat-footed old man. That does not stop him from landing some of his jokey lines just so. As Jay, the older brother, stoop-shouldered and gawky, Kyle Schliefer is fine when not losing track of the Bronx accent. Kevin Bergen as Eddie, their physically and emotionally frail fatherseems a bit too wishy-washy. Nothing about him says New York or Jewish.
Eddie's other siblings, also scarred by their mother's cold, pecunious and heartless manner, are caricatures of the grown up version of a damaged child. Gert (expertly played by Lise Bruneau) handles her character's idiosyncratic breathing problems —- another kind of reference to the stifling environment created by Grandma's presence— and Marcus Kyd's Louie is as slick as his hair pomade. Under Jerry Whiddon's direction and problems with accents and Jewishness aside, the cast does well in reviving what many consider Neil Simon's most profound play. Maybe this Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner is the one that should have been revived on Broadway instead of the ill-fated (Brighton Beach Memoirs.
Two Hours Traffic Blog
Lost in Yonkers at Theater J
A soft amber light is on the stage when you first walk into the small theatre. This combined with the comfortable-looking furniture immediately invites you into the room to have a closer look. The monochromatic palate seems a little somber upon closer inspection. Even the small glimpse of the New York City skyline is done in shades of brown. And yet,you still want to sink down on the couch with a Jane Austen novel and a cup of tea.
As always, artistic director Ari Roth makes a short speech before the show. The sold-out house is reminded that this is the first preview of this production. These actors have not yet had an audience, and the designers are still tweaking and perfecting. I was glad to have this information, as it would influence my view of the show.
When the lights come up, two boys are sitting on the couch, obviously nervous about something. These two, Jacob and Arty (Kyle Schliefer and Max Talisman, respectively) carry the next 20 minutes of the show, with only sporadic appearances by their father, Eddie (Kevin Bergen). After a while, their Aunt Bella (played to perfection by Holly Twyford) shows up. She has been described by the boys as not quite all there. Twyford moves from subject to subject and emotion to emotion like a hummingbird on speed, emulating the child that she mentally is. When Grandma finally comes onstage, after being talked about for the better part of the last 35 minutes, there is a full 30 seconds of silence onstage as she makes her way to her chair and settles herself. Every single eye, both in the audience and on the stage, was on Tana Hicken, who played the matriarch, making her painful way downstage. She is obviously feared.
Later, Uncle Louie shows up unexpectedly. Marcus Kyd makes this character a very typical New Yorker, complete with slicked-back hair and broad accent. He teaches the two boys some important lessons about respect and growing up strong. The last member of the family that has a part in the show is Aunt Gert, portrayed by Lisa Bruneau. They all congregate for a dinner when Bella has some important news which is not taken well. Twyford and Hicken draw on their past together (The Road to Mecca at Studio Theatre last season) and have an incredible rapport as mother and daughter.
Neil Simon's play was written in 1991 and takes place during World War II. While it could date itself because of the timeframe, the themes are still totally relevant to our lives today. It mainly deals with family and living with them, even when you don't like them very much. The characters are fleshed out not only by Simon's incredibly smart, witty script, but also the actors portraying them. Most of them have excellent business while they're onstage, and never take away from the actors who are speaking. Once they learn to hold for laughs, and get a little more comfortable in front of an audience, this will be a dynamite show.
Lost in Yonkers by Neil Simon
Theatre J
1529 16th St, NW
October 21 - November 29, 2009
3.5 stars
Washington City Paper
Lost in Yonkers: Filler Instinct
Theater J grapples with a cluttered Neil Simon play.
By Trey Graham
Posted: October 28, 2009
Lost in Yonkers
By Neil Simon; Directed by Jerry Whiddon
At Theater J to Nov. 29
Let’s get the lore out of the way: Neil Simon boycotted Washington for years, so the story goes, because Washington Post critic Lloyd Rose suggested the man had never quite figured out how to write a play. (Or words to that effect.) Rose was new to the chief critic’s chair, reviewing Lost in Yonkers during its pre-Broadway tryout at the National Theatre, and the play went on to win both a Tony and the drama Pulitzer—so you could see why Simon, who’d turned out a hit or two in his three decades of Broadway playmaking, might have been peeved.
Now, Lloyd Rose’s taste in plays was always interesting (and sometimes entertaining) to contemplate, and when it came to musicals, most musical-comedy buffs knew she and they would just have to agree to disagree. So many a D.C. theater geek has scored a schadenfreude-laced chuckle retelling the tale of that Lost in Yonkers kerfuffle over the years: Nothing comforts an actor or a director, after all, like thinking the critic who panned his show is a crank who wouldn’t know a Pulitzer-winner if it sat in her lap.
Now that I’ve actually seen Lost in Yonkers, however, I’m prepared to entertain a possibility that hadn’t occurred to me: Lloyd Rose got it right.
Oh, not that Neil Simon can’t write a play—that’s putting things a bit strongly, given the Brighton Beach trilogy. (Two-thirds of which, as it happens, are being revived in New York this season.) But Lost in Yonkers is a clumsy mess of a family melodrama, three parts stagy Borscht Belt comedy to two parts kitchen-sink realism, and if it’s got one hell of a confrontation at its core, it’s also got two or three characters with no real reason to exist—and Simon insists on putting one pair of them front and center all night long.
That would be Jay (Kyle Schliefer) and Artie (Max Talisman), the two kids whose dad plans to dump them at Grandma’s house while he goes over the river and through the Deep South selling scrap iron to pay off the loan shark who’s lately been eyeing his kneecaps. (Mom has died, you see, and Dad’s got a pile of bills; the U.S. health care system apparently had its drawbacks in the ’40s, too.)
Grandmother is a stern old thing, an icefrau with steel-gray braids and a sturdy cane for whacking noisy 13-year-olds, and it’s not until well into Act 1 that Simon clears away the knee-jerk joking and allows the real issue to come into focus: She’s so damaged and disappointed herself, this bitter old woman who’s lost one homeland and a couple of babies, that she’s crushed all hope of happiness out of her four adult children. And she’s prepared to start in on the grandkids if somebody doesn’t stand up and stop her.
But though they’re key to the plot’s central narrative device, the grandkids are thinly drawn creatures, seemingly dropped into Grandma Kurnitz’s living room to serve as comic foils and sideline commentators. Dad (Kevin Bergen) proves even more of a cipher—he’ll turn up again later, mostly so Grandma can mock him for being the family crybaby—and the business with Uncle Gangster (Marcus Kyd) and Aunt Funny-Talker (Lise Bruneau) is almost entirely filler.
Simon’s real interest is in Bella, the boys’ thirtysomething aunt, whose woman’s body belies a childlike sensibility. Born with scarlet fever, she’s never quite encountered the world the way most of us do, and her basically sunny disposition can cloud into something panicky and confused on a moment’s notice. It’s her redemption from the familial despair—or at least the hunger for it that’s awakened in her—that’s at the heart of Lost In Yonkers, and her disappointments that ring most true. And it’s she who finally brings Grandma to bay in that genuinely wrenching central clash.
Jerry Whiddon’s staging burns the oxygen out of the air in that one superlative moment, with Holly Twyford’s Bella shedding the sweetly scattered air that’s been her baseline all night and turning on her forbidding mother with the near-hysterical ferocity of someone with nothing left to lose. Tana Hicken’s Grandma Kurnitz goes shock-still as Bella lets fly with years’ worth of bottled-up resentment, and whether you read rage or pain or grief in the old lady’s rigid posture and her implacable façade, there’s no mistaking what she’s feeling when Bella finally reaches out to clamp her wrist in an untender hand: It’s the breaking of an emotional dam, the one that’s both kept her sane and stifled her humanity.
Whiddon’s production—dramaturged, as the Post’s Backstage column has puckishly pointed out, by none other than the now-retired Lloyd Rose—makes a moving case that there’s real anguish, real agony, behind Grandma Kurnitz’s harshness, that there’s a real kernel of tragedy in the stunted lives of her children and a real promise of a happier future for her and a newly confident Bella in the final scene.
That scene works so nicely, it’s worth noting, because all those distractions—the comic-relief grandsons, the needy dad, Aunt Funny-Talker and Uncle Gangster and all—have left the stage, taking Simon’s reflexive yuk-hunting with them. What’s left is honest and emotional and pungent and fine—and it’s the only thing in Lost in Yonkers that’s even remotely Pulitzer-worthy.
DC Theatre Scene
Lost in Yonkers
October 28, 2009 by Hunter Styles
Filed under Features, Our Reviews
“Lost In White Plains” just didn’t have the same ring to it. It had to be Yonkers – or, say it all together now: “Yahn-kahs” – that Big Apple burb of bustling immigrant life into which Neil Simon’s two rascally young protagonists are suddenly plunked down. They’ve been delivered to the place where laughter is snatched out of the air, where wrinkles are slapped smooth, and where dreams go to die a humdrum death. They’ve been delivered to Grandma’s.
Believe it or not, this Lost in Yonkers marks Theater J’s first adoption of a full-length Neil Simon play. You’d never know it from the company’s levelheaded and beguiling work on this, one of a number of Simon’s winsome fever dreams about growing up Jewish-American a few generations ago, at a time when kids tossed footballs to each other in empty lots while World War II rumbled on the horizon.
Notes of nostalgia aren’t as sweet here as they are in Brighton Beach Memoirs, Simon’s other truly great meditation on family and young hope. It’s a stark family portrait of brothers Jay and Arty: a dead mother, a broke father (Kevin Bergen) who must give them up for a year on the road selling scrap, and an unforgiving German grandmother (the marvelously acerbic Tana Hicken) who, with her successful neighborhood candy shop and loft apartment to boot, happens to tend the only safe haven around.
With wit, humor, and a hearty dose of exposition, Jay (an aporetic Kyle Schliefer) and little Arty (Max Talisman, brimming with zippy one-liners) step cautiously into an ossified lifestyle we all recognize from the homes of our own ancestors. The air is thick with do’s and don’ts (mostly don’ts) and one false move will put them right out onto the street again. Grandma – her hair in a tight gray bun, her big glasses pinched to a withering gaze – doesn’t seem to be joking. “You won’t be happy here,” she sneers. “And unhappy boys I don’t need.”
But despite her grim prognoses, Grandma turns out to be the only sour cherry in the bowl, as everyone around her coasts in and out of the apartment on a wave of good humor. Lost in Yonkers plays like a rekindled memory, and the cast fans the flames throughout with nimble, affectionate character work. The set, too, is homey and inviting. Scenic Designer Daniel Conway has crafted a cozy, realistic interior that, with the help of Daniel MacLean Wagner’s lighting, absorbs golden sunlight by day and exudes a chilly lunar brilliance at night.
As one might expect, it’s the wacky relatives that flesh out the comedy. Although she isn’t given much to work with, Lise Bruneau is charming as Aunt Gert, whose bizarre nervous breathing habits keep Arty and Jay snickering long after the gag’s grown thin for the rest of us. She arrives late in the play, amusing but sadly underutilized in Simon’s script.
More crucial to the proceedings is the renegade uncle Louie. Marcus Kyd brings a grin and a swagger to the role, ribbing the lost boys for their green ways and employing the word “moxie” with no reservations. Louie has snuck back to Grandma’s house to hide out for a while, dismissing his shadowy cause as “a minor neighborhood problem.” His conversations with Arty and Jay hold a tensive tone – even the fun crooks carry loaded guns – and it’s here that director Jerry Whiddon is most adept at fine-tuning the cast’s timing and flow.
As fun as the wisecracking boys are, the real drama resides in the women, particularly in Grandma’s struggle to tame the tireless optimism of Aunt Bella (Holly Twyford, reuniting with Hicken after last year’s The Road To Mecca at Studio Theatre). Like Laura in The Glass Menagerie, Bella has been cooped up well into her prime, but unlike Tennessee Williams’ antiheroine, Bella is loud, blunt, and talkative, continually fascinated by the facts and fictions she’s spun into personal truth. Within Grandma’s noiseless home, she is at once an innocent and a transgressor. Jay and Arty veer from amusement to confusion and back as they observe their childlike aunt gushing with manic joy about the details of daily life, even as she is kept from truly living. It is Bella’s journey to independence, rather than the boys’, into which we end up investing the most concern.
Like a great number of Simon’s characters, the Yonkers clan are written as living legends. Whether hero or villain, their reputations precede them into the room, and it takes a conscientious group of artists to discover how to play to type for laughs without surrendering to caricature. The touch isn’t always subtle — some moments of explosive glee and slack-jawed incredulity feel too much like mugging for the camera — but some faint traces of artificiality are appropriate given the degree to which these family members are performing for each other. Louie comes off as a gangster, in part, for the sake of the boys. Bella, too, is hungry for love. Even Grandma, when alone, may allow herself some genuine feeling.
We are still in a position to laugh at Bella when she speaks lovingly of home. “Big families are important for when you have trouble in your life,” she grins. But as the spectacle dissolves and we grow to know her better, we realize how crucial this simple belief remains. Often, Bella only hears what she wants to hear, but it is her steadfastness that holds the group together. If the alternative is losing your roots, maybe it’s best to stay planted for a while after all.
Lost In Yonkers
by Neil Simon
directed by Jerry Whiddon
produced by Theater J
reviewed by Hunter Styles
Potomac Stages
Lost in Yonkers
Reviewed October 25 by David Siegel A haunting performance by Holly Tywford “makes” this Neil Simon come alive
Running time 2:25 – one intermission
A family choked with afflictions, laden-down by the forbidding presence of their immigrant matriarch makes an at times piercing evening that is often smoothed over with the well-constructed, wise humor of the prolific Neil Simon. What is most appealing in this production is the casting choices by director Jerry Whiddon. He has rethought the piece and moved what could have been a very insular New York City remembrance piece focused on a Jewish family into a broader outlook. There are no stereotypical ethnic-types cast in the featured roles. There is inspired moxie in Whiddon’s artistic decisions. The sharply insightful performance of Holly Tywford, as a 35 year old with developmental disabilities attempting to make her own choices so that she can live independently from her mother, Tana Hicken, is haunting. She presents an enormous range that is a revelation, one that makes an audience direct their eyes to her as she pulls her fingernails, sits on a couch with toes turned in and knees together, or presents a big open smile and bright eyes wanting only a hug of affection in return. Tywford’s composure at the tougher details for her character, as when she is called upon to turn down her eyes when something she may not quite understand comes into her ears, trying to quickly figure out a way to react without showing hurt, are beyond description and must be witnessed. She just moves authentically from excitably manic to calmly advocating for her own life, from standing up to a threatening presence to a deep discerning awareness of someone on the borders of girlish intellect and womanly desires for fulfillment. The impressively meticulous technical design radiates the period of the 1940’s. From the visual appearance of the living room to the retro outfits, there is so much to savor. Yet the script seems just too composed of a one of each kind of beaten down family member; ending abruptly with a too pretty happy bow tied; quickly manipulating to bring a warm feeling as each character has a decent way forward.
Storyline: A coming of age comic drama set in the 1940’s as two brothers are left by their traveling father to fend for themselves with their formidable immigrant grandmother, a sweet simple-minded aunt, an excitable aunt and a hoodlum uncle.
Winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize and 1991 Tony Award for Best Play, Lost in Yonkers has been described by some as Neil Simon’s best play. The show ran for 780 performances. It has not been seen in Washington since its pre-Broadway run. The now 82 year old Simon has had a nearly 50 year career that began with Come Blow Your Horn (1961) and progressed to The Odd Couple (1965) with 30 more titles that audiences of a certain age will recall by heart. Currently his work is in revival on the NYC stage with Brighton Beach Memoirs up now and Broadway Bound expected soon. Director Whiddon indicated that he wanted the audience to appreciate issues related to “survival, identity and the family at war-time.” With his casting and his touches, the jokes of Simon are not what an audience will be left contemplating as issues of family emotional abuse and its long aftermath are the centerpiece. Whiddon’s artistic choices open-up Lost in Yonkers for non-New Yorkers. Perhaps others will react to the beating heart of Yonkers so it is not lost as those it depicts leave this earth.
Tana Hicken, as the cold, inhospitable Grandma, has a life story that would bring Job to his knees and argue with God: “why me?” But where Job argued with God, Hicken presses all of her own hurt, disappointments and pain on her children and grandchildren. She is one of cutting, mocking remarks. No one is ever good enough, no one ever strong enough. Love and life is only fleeting; only the tough survive. At least that is her character. But, the menace is not quite there, even with the wonders of her constant down-turned mouth, and her adept skills with a cane as if it was weapon, an extension of her words as they cascade from her mouth. Hicken just seems more depressed and put upon than fearfully nasty. Hicken’s sons include the weak-kneed Eddie, (Kevin Bergen), father of two young sons he dumps for a year as his life has been pulled apart by the slow death of his wife driving a need to go to a loan-shark for money since health insurance was not available. Marcus Key is Hicken’s other son, a tough-talking, gun-carrying small time hoodlum who finds his own way through life that started with punishment inflicted for manufactured transgressions. The two grandsons left to fend for themselves with Hicken when their father must travel to earn money, are Kyle Schliefer and Max Talisman. They are the family glue points, becoming the resilient members who might actually break through the sorrowful family dynamics that they endure. Schliefer is the older straight arrow of the pair, supposedly about 15 or so, while Talisman is the nervous energy, wise-cracking 13 ½ year old.
The technical team is full of Helen Hayes award nominees and recipients, and it shows. Daniel Conway’s set is an icon of the period. It is meticulous in detail in its one-room design. Dark wallpaper with heavy “old country” furniture that sill speaks very personally to the audience from perhaps their own histories. The costumes by Misha Kachman are as if a closet closed for 60 years was opened and hanging on a long closet rod were the “just right” outfits, and in the closet was a trunk that - miracle upon miracle - had the right shoes and hats along with that wonderful rich red lipstick from the period.
By Neil Simon. Directed by Jerry Whiddon. Design: Daniel Conway (set) Misha Kachman (costumes) Daniel MacLean Wagner (lights) Neil McFadden (sound) Stan Barouh (photography) Karen Currie (stage manager). Cast: Kevin Bergen, Lise Bruneau, Tana Hicken, Marcus Kyd, Kyle Schliefer, Max Talisman, Holly Twyford.
Washington Examiner
Simon's 'Lost In Yonkers' an ultimate dysfunctional family tale
By: Barbara Mackay
Special to The Examiner
October 27, 2009
Neil Simon is an undisputed master of comedy, but in some of his plays there are such poignant emotional elements -- when Simon writes of nostalgia for the past or the importance of family, for instance -- that his funny lines and comic scenarios seem to be mere byproducts in the work of a first-rate, serious dramatist.
"Lost in Yonkers," currently at Theater J, is one of those plays. Set in 1942, loss and poverty have already described the future for two brothers: 15-year-old Jay (Kyle Schliefer) and 13-year-old Arty (Max Talisman) have lost their mother to cancer. Their father, Eddie (Kevin Bergen), is broke and determined to go on the road selling scrap metal, so he leaves the boys with their dictatorial, icy Grandma Kurnitz (Tana Hicken).
The situation means the boys will also live with their aunt, Bella (the brilliant Holly Twyford), a sweet woman who is mentally slightly slow and who takes care of Grandma. Add to the mix a slick, gun-toting, mob-connected uncle, Louie (Marcus Kyd), and another aunt, Gert (Lise Bruneau), who hyperventilates when around her demanding mother, and you have Simon's definition of the ultimate disconnected, confining family.
Yet this is a comedy, after all, so Simon allows his characters to break free from that confinement, find themselves and become connected. Schliefer and Talisman are particularly winning as the brothers who view lessons of loss, survival and loyalty with irony and humor.
Confrontations abound throughout "Lost in Yonkers," but Bella's final resistance to Grandma Kurnitz is the most powerful. Bella's revelation that all she ever wanted from her mother was love might sound cliched: given Twyford's superb acting, it is absolutely credible and absolutely heartbreaking.
Director Jerry Whiddon has created an effective ensemble, which portrays Simon's seven isolated individuals slowly growing into a union, each character -- even Grandma -- ultimately helping another. Daniel Conway's meticulously designed brown/gold/amber set, full of dusky photographs and pristine antimacassars, locates the play in a tidy, stifling place where existence itself has begun to atrophy, until Arty and Eddie burst in, breathing life and vigor into it.
Washington Post - Backstage
'Lost in Yonkers' found at Theater J - Neil Simon play is the first production to run in D.C. since 1991
By Jane Horwitz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
In January 1991, Neil Simon's "Lost in Yonkers" opened in a pre-Broadway run at the National Theatre. The Post's chief drama critic at the time, Lloyd Rose, began her mixed-to-negative review with the opinion that Simon "has been writing plays for 30 years and he still can't handle the basic elements of dramaturgy," later faulting him for not "following his darker impulses to an honest conclusion."
Simon was not happy with that assessment. He was likely unamused a month later as well, when Frank Rich of the New York Times criticized the play's predictability, "flaccid structure and automatic-pilot jokeyness," while praising the "raw anguish" of some of Simon's characters.
"Lost in Yonkers" went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, ran on Broadway for nearly two years and was made into a 1993 film.
Now, Theater J is mounting the first production in Washington since 1991, which runs Wednesday night through Nov. 29. Jerry Whiddon is directing and Lloyd Rose herself, who left The Post earlier in the decade to become a full-time author, is helping Whiddon in rehearsals as his "dramaturgical consultant" on the play. (Rose gently but firmly declined to be interviewed for this article.)
The cast includes Tana Hicken and Holly Twyford, together again after their lauded pairing in Studio Theatre's "The Road to Mecca" last year. Hicken plays the embittered Grandma Kurnitz, a steely German Jewish matriarch whose three adult children remain shellshocked from their affection-starved childhoods. Twyford plays her daughter Bella, who suffers from a mild cognitive disability.
It is the summer of 1942, and into Grandma Kurnitz and Bella's Yonkers apartment come Grandma's newly widowed son Eddie (Kevin Bergen), who needs to leave his two boys (Max Talisman and Kyle Schliefer) with her while he travels. Grandma Kurnitz's other children, Louie (Marcus Kyd) the gangster and the breathless Gert (Lise Bruneau), also turn up.
Whiddon says he found Simon's "Lost in Yonkers" to be a real actors' script. "I developed a real affection for the play -- for its playability." And in the abrupt transitions from pathos to hilarity that some critics faulted, Whiddon has found a challenge. "How do you approach the comedy, at the same time you know it's either right in the middle of, or preceding, or right after a moment of pathos?" he asks. The answer, Whiddon concludes: "It's all in the same moment. It's not separate things. . . . For me, it's always part of a larger context."
As for the dramaturgical quirks of "Lost in Yonkers," Theater J Artistic Director Ari Roth says the play "creates its own strange rhythm. It may wrap up a tad neatly. It may not be a classic-classic play, but for a while there, it's pretty great."