Terriffic Performances and Direction Result in an Enthralling 'Memoirs'
2007-05-11
NEW MILFORD — Co-directors Glenn R. Couture and Tom Libonate have taken Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs and given it such a lovingly crafted production at TheatreWorks New Milford, that no matter how often you may have seen it before, the result is brand new and enthralling.
Ben Grinberg shines as Eugene Morris Jerome, the irrepressible 15-year-old hero who narrates this portrait of seven family members crammed into a small house in Brooklyn.
The year is 1937. In addition to Eugene and his 18 year old brother, Stanley, the parents, Jack and Kate, have taken in Kate's widowed younger sister, Blanche, and her two daughters. While Eugene's twin preoccupations — his newly discovered awareness of girls and his grandiose plans for a career with the New York Yankees — provide plenty of hilarious Simonesque comic fodder, at the same time, the adults are grappling with the grinding poverty of the Great Depression, and the looming shadow of the war in Europe. This is particularly threatening to the Jeromes as Jews. Having emigrated to America themselves as children, Jack and Kate still have many relatives facing Nazi persecution back in Poland and Russia.
There are two main themes to the play. In the age old conflict between generations, the children imagine the glory that can be theirs: Eugene will be a baseball player or a writer; his 16-year old cousin, Nora, who has been taking music and dance lessons, wants to leave school for a job in the chorus of a Broadway show; even Stanley, who is already laboring like his father in the garment center because the family needs his $17-a-week salary, has visions of making a killing as a poker player, or else joining the army and maybe getting to be a sergeant. Meanwhile, for the anxiety wracked adults, who live in perpetual fear of disaster, the answer to every dream is a resounding No.
M.J. Hartell plays Kate as a shrill, nagging, harridan, who cleans with a vengeance and produces inedible meals of liver and boiled cabbage as a way of putting guilt trips on the others.
Joe Harding is wonderfully stolid and ox-like as Jack, who moonlights after working ten-hour days as a garment cutter by lugging heavy suitcases around to peddle novelties.
Susan Abrams is the timid and gentle younger sister, Blanche, who, shattered by the early loss of her husband, and the bad eyesight that makes her virtually unemployable, bucks Kate's indignant protests to consider a friendship with Mr Murphy from across the street — an Irishman who drinks and lives with his mother, but who is polite and has a good job as a printer.
The other, equally important theme of the play is the resilient sense of family that ultimately holds these people together. After a climactic angry scene in which everyone lets it all hang out, venting their stored up resentments, the genuine love and respect which they have for one another is finally revealed.
The directors have coaxed terrific performances from the entire cast. Tom Mulhare is smart and cocky as the worldly experienced Stanley, but at the same time he displays his own vulnerability and uncertainty. Keilly Gillen McQuail in the role of Nora is also an adolescent mix of poise and resentment, and Emma Nissenbaum as the bespectacled nine-year-old Laurie — a prodigy with a heart murmur who must be coddled and protected — also does a fine job. Perhaps the ultimate message of the play is summed up in Jack's wise and kindly advice to his older son, to the effect of "do not idolize your parents as being perfect, because if you do, you'll end up hating yourself every time you make a mistake."
Brighton Beach Memoirs is a classic, and it deserves to be.