STAGE REVIEW : Family Values a la Neil Simon

A play about a retarded aunt, a father on the skids, an uncle who’s a bag man for the mob and a grandmother with all the instincts of a Nazi doesn’t sound much like a comedy. But Neil Simon comedies are harder to define these days. This includes Simon’s “Lost in Yonkers,” broadly described above and seen at a Wednesday preview at the Doolittle Theatre in Hollywood.

This is another of Simon’s autobiographical set-ups where, between the laughs and the one-liners, you find something called the Awful Truth. Nothing, Simon has discovered, is harder to get at, more bewildering--or funnier.

Getting at it demanded a certain willingness on his part to feed on life experience and look dysfunction in the eye, starting with adolescence in “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” going on to manhood in “Biloxi Blues” and returning to Brighton Beach for a rite of passage in “Broadway Bound.”

These plays also forever changed the Simon style. Gone, in the last decade, was the glib situation comedy. In its place thrived reminiscence, culminating in “Yonkers,” where hilarious meets poignant in its re-creation of childhood perceptions. And it is the first play to earn Simon a Pulitzer Prize.

Although she’s not the central character, the focus is on Grandma Kurnitz (Mercedes McCambridge), a Jewish matriarch who escaped Nazi Germany but who must have learned about human relations at Hitler’s knee.

The time is 1942. Grandma lives with her slightly retarded grown-up daughter Bella (Brooke Adams) above the Kurnitz candy store in Yonkers. She runs the store like the Reign of Terror. When Grandma’s widowed son Eddie (Martin Shakar) has to take a job as a traveling salesman and asks his mother to take in his two boys, she greets the notion with the warmth of a barracuda.

For the boys, Jay, 15, and Arty, 13, moving in with Grandma is moving in with a barracuda. They feel sentenced to this cavernous old apartment. (Santo Loquasto’s interior is a lugubrious array of maroons, antimacassars and oak, lit with appropriate gloom by Tharon Musser.) The boys are tossed between an over-exuberant aunt, and a cane-wielding tyrant, dressed as a grandmother, who provides such bracing pearls of encouragement as, “If you were a boy growing up in Germany you would be dead by now.”

But at 13 and 15, life is also rich in danger and discovery, especially when things heat up and pistol-toting Uncle Louie (Ned Eisenberg) drops in unannounced, Bella decides she’s going to get married, and Bella’s sister Gert, a woman with the strangest of breathing disorders, comes to visit.

Louie and Gert are a bit sketchy, but Simon’s skill is in meticulously completing his context and his other characters. The play may be about the boys--transparent alter egos for Simon and his brother Danny--and seen through their eyes, but its achievement lies in making sweet, irritating Bella and even icy Grandma human.

When the latter closely questions the boys, her observations show uncommon perspicacity if no kindness. And her merciless assessment of her own son Eddie has a harsh component of truth.

This touring production finds its edges only slightly blunted by the intermittent chemistry between Arty and Jay (the boys are played here by Alex Dezen and Jeff Maynard, respectively), and because McCambridge stops just short of being the unrelenting monster delivered by Irene Worth in the Broadway version. This reduces some of the impact of the play’s more emotional scenes.

Brooke Adams, on the other hand, is a lovely surprise as Bella, at once innocent and annoying, overwhelming in her neediness, yet hard to resist in the unqualified sincerity of her effusions.

Dezen is particularly wry as the younger and more brazen of the brothers and the cutting precision of Eisenberg’s minor hood as Louie is sufficiently spicy to arouse the attention of his young nephews.

For the rest, Shakar as their father Eddie has the flustered despair and stoop of a loser and Polly Adams makes the most of a seriously underwritten role as Gert.

Interesting that Los Angeles is getting “Yonkers” at the same time that it has Sybille Pearson’s “Unfinished Stories” at the Mark Taper Forum. Divergent as they may be, both plays are driven by the presence of an archetypal Jewish grandparent and both deal in generational distance and unfinished family business. One makes you laugh, the other think, but both make you understand that families, especially immigrant families, are unavoidably fractured, and that what ultimately heals is the willingness to hold hands and stare without blinking into the abyss.

“Lost in Yonkers,” Doolittle Theatre, 1615 N. Vine St., Hollywood. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m.; also Sunday, July 19, 26, Aug. 2, 9, 30, 7 p.m., and Aug. 13, 20, Sept. 3, 10, 17, 24, 2 p.m. Ends Sept. 27. $31-$42. (213) 365-3500. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

Jeff Maynard: Jay

Alex Dezen: Arty

Martin Shakar: Eddie

Brooke Adams: Bella

Mercedes McCambridge: Grandma Kurnitz

Ned Eisenberg: Louie

Polly Adams: Gert

A presentation of Center Theatre Group/Ahmanson, American Express Gold Card and Emanuel Azenberg. Director Gene Saks. Playwright Neil Simon. Sets and costumes Santo Loquasto. Lights Tharon Musser. Sound Tom Morse. Production stage manager Tom Bartlett. Stage managers Terry Witter, Augie Mericola.