Speak, Memory

By T.E. Kalem

BRIGHTON BEACH MEMOIRS by Neil Simon

In most of his previous works, Neil Simon has parried the perils of heart-to-heart emotional commitment with a disarming quip. A loose upper lip has been his tactic for keeping pain in quarantine. With an ironclad consistency, he has been the Man in the Comic Mask.

The endearing aspect of Brighton Beach Memoirs is that the mask has slipped a little. Without slighting his potent comic gifts, Simon looks back, not in anger, remorse or undue guilt but with fondly nourished compassion, at himself as an adolescent in 1937 and at the almost asphyxiatingly close-knit family around him. While the play housed at Broadway's Alvin Theater does not fully attain the playwright's highest aims, it does give off compelling glints of an urban Morning's at Seven, a ghetto Our Town and a wryly caustic Ah, Wilderness! Like them, Brighton Beach Memoirs belongs to the family genre where the passwords are forgive and remember.

The hub of the play is the teen-age Eugene, portrayed with winning deadpan guile by Matthew Broderick. He acts as narrator, a kind of perky tourist guide to darkest Depression Brooklyn. He is possessed by two maddeningly tantalizing desires: to play for the New York Yankees and to behold a naked woman while eating an ice cream cone.

Though Eugene dearly, if undemonstratively, loves his family, he announces the members of the household like coming attractions he would rather not see. Mother (Elizabeth Franz) is an obsessive homemaker with the bawl of a staff sergeant. She inhales imminent doom with every breath. When Eugene asks why he cannot buy a half-pound of butter in the morning instead of a quarter-pound each in the a.m. and p.m., his mother retorts with fatalistic logic: "Suppose the house burned down this afternoon!"

Father (Peter Michael Goetz) has the wheyfaced fatigue and resigned gallantry of the immigrant provider who got a foothold on U.S. soil only to have the Depression whittle it to a scrabbling fingerhold on survival. Simon is openly comfortable with the Jewishness of his characters, and he knows the dread words that are italicized whispers in this home: "cancer," "diphtheria," "heart attack."

There are soap-operatic calamities in this extended family, complete with a widowed aunt (Joyce Van Patten), her restless older daughter (Jodi Thelen) and her coddled, sickly younger one (Mandy Ingber). But they are redeemed by Simon's abiding affection. In a character portrait in depth, Zeljko Ivanek, as Eugene's older brother, provides his panting sibling with a silver lining: not a Yankees uniform but a French postcard. This season's silver lining is Neil Simon's love letter to his past.

--By T.E. Kalem This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.