Lost In Yonkers Press

October 21–November 29, 2009  
By Neil Simon 
Directed by Jerry Whiddon

In a remarkable coming-of-age story that won 4 Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize, two brothers are left to fend for themselves in a dysfunctional household with their formidable immigrant grandmother, sweet but simple-minded aunt and a hoodlum of an uncle. This classic American tale is simultaneously comic and poignant.

Press Release

Fact Sheet

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.  Click here to keep reading

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.  Click here to keep reading

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. Click here to keep reading

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.)   Click here to keep reading

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.   Click here to keep reading

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.  Click here to keep reading

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.  Click here to keep reading

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.  Click to keep reading

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.   Click here to keep reading

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).  Click here to keep reading

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.  Click here to read more.

Full press page for Lost In Yonkers