NEW SHOWS FROM SONDHEIM AND SIMON : ‘Broadway Bound’ Brings Out the Pain and Joy of Family in the Last of Trilogy

Neil Simon’s “Broadway Bound” arrived on Broadway Thursday, giving every indication that it intends to stay. The comedy, if one can call it that, is the hit that a beleaguered Broadway has been waiting for.

Aside from its prophetic title, this third, best and final segment of Simon’s semiautobiographical trilogy relates more to the first one (“Brighton Beach Memoirs”) and virtually overlooks the second (“Biloxi Blues”).

“Broadway Bound” is about Eugene Morris Jerome’s coming to terms. It finds our hero back in Brighton Beach in the late ‘40s.

We are, in fact, back in the same house where Eugene (beautifully performed by Jonathan Silverman) grew up with his brother Stanley (Jason Alexander). (David Mitchell did the cutaway set, adding only snow to accommodate the season.)

The boys still inhabit their same rooms. The furniture is a little newer and the dining room table, a family heirloom, is still what it always was: Stage left--at the emotional center of what we now see is a more troubled family than we had suspected when the boys were younger.

Not surprising, really. In “Brighton Beach,” we had seen life in this Brooklyn household through the eyes of Eugene the boy. In “Broadway Bound,” we see it through those of Eugene the man, about to leave his childhood and his childhood home forever. It’s a sobering view.

Aunt Blanche (Phyllis Newman) has remarried and is living wealthily where she now belongs: Somewhere in the periphery of the play. At the play’s heart, aside from the boys, are their parents: Father Jack (Philip Sterling, in the least defined of the roles) who has had an affair; and mother Kate (Linda Lavin) who has suspected it all along.

The household has a sturdy new presence: Kate’s Trotskyite father, Ben (searingly etched by John Randolph), an amalgam of unexpressed emotions and shrewd insights, so deeply rooted in Brighton Beach that he won’t follow his wife to Florida.

The first act of “Broadway Bound” is spent setting this all up; the second unravels it, thread by anguished thread. If “Brighton Beach Memoirs” was mostly about Eugene, “Broadway Bound” opens up to encompass the whole family and especially Kate. It is as much about the death of a marriage as it is about the birth of the brothers’ comedy writing team. (“I love being a writer,” exults Eugene. “It’s the writing that’s hard.”)

You’d never know the “writing was hard” when you witness the maturation of Simon’s writing here. It has grown to reflect the seriousness of his themes. There is plenty of comedy left, but of a different order. The one-liners are gone, replaced by a well-timed visceral humor that is coated in melancholy.

The sort of Jewish “Ah, Wilderness!” that was “Memoirs” has not given way to a Jewish “Long Day’s Journey.” But “Broadway Bound” achieves a candor that is heavily underlined in black. Its second act is achingly observed and delivered with a frankness as often poignant as it is funny.

No one gives a more satisfying (or surprising) performance than Lavin as Kate--a woman of impenetrable dignity going through a mid-life crisis. In the play’s finest moment, she sheds layer after layer of self-concealment in response to the gentle proddings of her younger son, until we finally glimpse the graceful young girl who once, for a golden moment, danced with George Raft at the Primrose Ballroom.

Silverman, so pleasantly remembered as Eugene in the national company of “Brighton Beach,” again comes through with the mix of tenderness and turmoil that made him such a beguiling adolescent in the earlier play. He’s older now, his mood tempered and his egotism muted by the surrounding pain. “You see now why I want to write comedy,” he comments wryly as he surveys the devastation.

Indeed, we do. And it is no small thanks to director Gene Saks, a long-time collaborator with Simon, who has staged “Broadway Bound” with a restraint that saves it from becoming too sentimental or ingratiating. It is Simon not only at his finest, but at his most personal and complex.

A sample of the New York reviews:

Frank Rich, New York Times: “Broadway’s most successful practitioner of tidy dramaturgy continues to enhance the complexity that has brought him artistic rebirth in his cycle of autobiographical plays . . . .”

Allan Wallach, Newsday: “ . . . gives this lagging Broadway season the emotional jolt it has needed. More than in any earlier play, Simon is confronting his family’s pain, and the confrontation makes his humor both deeper and more muted. . . .”

Clive Barnes in the New York Post: “Its faults are a willingness to be too cute and too ingratiating to the audience. The beauties are memorable, the faults forgivable. . . .”

“Broadway Bound” A new play by Neil Simon presented at the Broadhurst Theater, Broadway. Producer Emanuel Azenberg. Director Gene Saks. Scenery David Mitchell. Costumes Joseph G. Aulisi. Lighting Tharon Musser. Sound Tom Morse. Stage manager Peter Lawrence. Cast Linda Lavin, John Randolph, Jonathan Silverman, Jason Alexander, Phyllis Newman, Philip Sterling.