On Stage
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage SIMONIZED SUCCESS BY LEO SAUVAGE Among the 20-odd Neil Simon plays presented on Broadway, few have been failures by the lights of the critics, and fewer by the figures of the box office....
...Many, like Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, and Plaza Suite were enormously successful and deserved to be: They were humorous, well-written and skillfully constructed...
...They are, in order of appearance (if not importance), getting lunch and dinner on the table in time, the future of her two sons, and her deteriorating marriage of 33 years...
...What Grandfather Ben has maintained from his youth, and most of all his union days, is a moral attitude, not an ideological allegiance...
...In the boastfully ambitious wake of his radio debut Eugene at first thinks of the reminiscence as so much grist for his writing talent...
...Dreamily, she goes on to recall how one evening at the Primrose Ballroom she danced with George Raft...
...Sparring with his daughter who married into the silk-stocking class, Ben is animated not by any theoretical proposition but simply by his long-held feelings of solidarity with the poor and hostility toward the rich...
...The scene is a classic...
...They work frenetically at it—or at least Stanley does...
...As we know from his teenage diary entries and his stream-of-consciousness asides in the earlier Memoirs, he has always dreamed of being published I performed (although he appeared to be aiming higher than filling in space between radio commercials...
...Itoc-curs when Kate Jerome is alone with her son Eugene, who will soon be departing for Manhattan to take up his new career as a comedy writer...
...Apparently he is not troubled by the fact that these minutes, after all, are supposed to mark the turning point in the playwright's life...
...Simon is undeniably an important American playwright...
...Rather—as Simon has Grandfather Ben explain in a sort of psycho-analyticdiagnosis—everyone was stunned because Eugene and Stanley had unconsciously captured the experience of the family...
...It turns out that the Jeromes' silence was due not to the incomprehensible vapidity of what they heard on the radio...
...Rounding out the cast of characters (the "other woman" is never seen) are Grandfather Ben (John Randolph), an old Socialist who is happy to stay in Brooklyn while his wife resides alone in Miami Beach, Florida, and his younger daughter, Aunt Blanche (Phyllis Newman...
...The possibility began to be bruited as Simon entered a new phase in 1982 with Brighton Beach Memoirs, followed two years later by Biloxi Blues (which garnered h i m a Tony...
...His characterization of a late '40s-style Socialist is rather less successful...
...Are we to believe the famous playwright became Broadway bound thanks to such a witless lucubration...
...Soon, though, a spark of maturity is kindled, and he gently abets his mother's fantasy by dancing with her in an imaginary ballroom...
...Eugene is the writer...
...The non sequitur, while not erased, is rendered somewhat less gaping through a sudden interpretative shift that follows— at the cost of opening a new, utterly artificial chapter...
...Simon subtly limns the hesitant, defensive type of nouveau-riche exemplified by mink-clad Blanche...
...Stanley has managed to get the brothers a job participating in the writing of a radio script...
...she is in fact a bookish type, and thus affords Jack the chance to talk about something other than Brighton Beach...
...Is he a great one, or even, as some suggest, the greatest...
...Forgetting the kitchen and—temporarily—her husband's decision to leave her for his mistress, she launches into a lengthy and moving monologue evoking the arrival of her immigrant grandparents in America and their droll reaction as they sight the Statue of Liberty...
...Gene Saks' direction compounds the scene's strangeness by heavily accenting Jerome's growing disappointment and helpless consternation during the broadcast...
...Then the phone starts to ring and a social aspect emerges: The sketch was so real, so lifelike, that other Brighton Beach families saw themselves in it too...
...The play is not...
...Happily, Simon and Saks have conspired to give us one moment in Broadway Bound that is truly dramatic...
...As far as can be judged from these laboriously farcical scenes, the product of their collaboration will be on the level of a ninth-rate 1940s radio show...
...Yet Simon has him repeatedly uttering the name of Leon Trotsky, a serious mistake even if the playwright once knew an old Socialist for whom Trotsky was the paramount prophet...
...It is a funny way to pay homage to the broadcasting system that afforded him the first step up the ladder of success...
...on the contrary, the sketch is supposed to be so compelling that the brothers are offered lucrative jobs with the network four weeks later...
...Eugene mixes sporadic enthusiasm with phlegmatic nonsense and frequent yawns...
...The judgment is then confirmed when the family gathers around to listen to the broadcast and no one appears able to make heads or tails of the story— including the brothers...
...Though not a traveling salesman, he keeps a woman on the side...
...It would be apt to call them well-made, without the pejorative meaning usually intended when that term is applied not to a piece of furniture but to a work for the stage...
...Hewas developing a more or less autobiographical trilogy whose third part, Broadway Bound, has opened at the Broadhurst Theater...
...Stanley, the older and more agitated sibling, does the pushing...
...Let's take a close look at the crowning Broadway Bound...
...It is a credit to John Randolph's superb acting that his character is nonetheless alive and true on stage...
...Her appeal, however, has little to do with a black negligee...
...And now Neil Simon, already a proven crowd- and critic-pleaser, is being celebrated as a penetrating, deeply human dramatist...
...More embarrassing, because it involves the very core of the play, is the way the beginning of Eugene Jerome's—Neil Simon's?—triumphant career in show business is depicted...
...Itis the 1940s...
...Since the network (which still exists) is expressly identified, we must presume that what we are seeing has some basis in fact, or at least in Simon's memory...
...Their mother, Kate Jerome (Linda Lavin), has three main worries...
...Eugene Jerome(Jona-than Silverman) and his brother Stanley (Jason Alexander) are hoping to get into show business by way of writing comedy for radio...
...It is impossible to see him as one of those Jewish intellectuals still attending Socialist meetings where members were ousted after arguments over the "correct" and "scientific" interpretation of Marxism-Leninism...
...Blanche has married a rich man and would like to ship Ben off to Florida too, probably because it sounds better on Park Avenue than does Brighton Beach, Brooklyn...
...Husband Jack (Philip Sterling) is in the garment industry...
...No satire or self-deprecation seems implied...
Vol. 69 • December 1986 • No. 19
