‘Lost in Yonkers’ Finds Favor With Critics : Broadway: Neil Simon’s latest play about family conflict features strong performances by Irene Worth and Mercedes Ruehl.

The critics aren’t completely charmed, but among scattered barbs, Neil Simon’s latest Broadway offering, “Lost in Yonkers,” has earned some of the sweetest bouquets ever tossed his way.

Most agree that the play about family conflicts, particularly a ferocious clash between the tyrannical Grandma Kurnitz and her downtrodden slave of a daughter, finds its humor and truth in a darker place than Simon followers are used to.

Frederick M. Winship of United Press International described Simon’s 40s-era play as an exploration of “the tragic results of love withheld and dreams denied.” He said it’s “the first serious new American play of a Broadway season that has been waiting much too long for a work of distinction.”

Newsday’s Linda Winer said “Neil Simon’s 27th play is surely his least sentimental and most satisfying dark comedy--make that tragi-comedy--to date,” with a “dream” cast.

New York Times reviewer Frank Rich was less pleased. He lavishly admired the performances by Irene Worth and Mercedes Ruehl, saying that the two “indelibly embodied” Simon’s clashing mother and daughter. But, Rich scolded, “nearly every joke, theme, or plot turn . . . is laboriously telegraphed,” and he decried its “flaccid structure and automatic-pilot jokeyness.”

Rich also noted the “delicacy” in Santo Loquasto’s set (the show business trade paper Daily Variety called it “homey”) and observed that “if such lightness of touch is otherwise rare, its absence is balanced by the presence of something new in the playwright’s canon: a raw anguish that not even the usual (and forced) upbeat final curtain can wish away.”

The play is “hardly Mr. Simon’s most accomplished work,” Rich finished, but “when the riveting Ms. Worth and Ms. Ruehl take center stage . . . the wounds run so deep that one feels it just may be his most honest.”

Daily Variety used the phrase “a wrenching ride through a family house of horrors” to describe the work. “After the silliness of ‘Rumors,’ Simon returns to New York in the funny-sober mood he left, with ‘Broadway Bound,’ five years ago. It’s a welcome return, if not an easy one.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s Robert Osborne said the playwright has returned “with a genuine bang” and his play has a “limitless life expectancy.”

The New York Post’s Clive Barnes said “Lost in Yonkers,” is “at least for seven-eighths of its length, the best play Simon ever wrote” and USA Today critic David Patrick Stearns found humor and poignancy in a play that he said “contains Simon’s best works (sic),” adding that “other parts are messy and confused.”

The Wall St. Journal’s Edwin Wilson gave Simon all around high marks: “Broadway desperately needs a comedy, a drama, a hit. With ‘Lost in Yonkers,’ Mr. Simon has given us all three.”