As word association goes, if I said “Neil Simon,” chances are you would respond “comedy.”
After all, there has been no more commercially successful purveyor of comedies in American history. Yet some of his best plays came in the latter half of his career when Simon learned to hold back on punch lines and wade into deeper, more heartfelt, dramatic waters.
Consider, for instance, 1991’s Lost in Yonkers, the tale of a tough-minded German-American grandmother, her emotionally damaged adult offspring and the two young teen grandchildren forced by dire circumstances to live with her in the title New York suburb during World War II. There are plenty of laughs in the first-rate Palm Beach Dramaworks production that jump-starts the company’s 25th anniversary season, but at its core, this saga of family and family dysfunction is certainly — as the organization’s name suggests — a drama.
No sooner have we taken in the visual pleasures of Bert Scott’s sizeable, though austere apartment set that we notice Jay and Arty Kurnitz, sweltering from the heat and fidgeting from their imminent encounter with their humorless, cane-wielding grandmother. Their challenge will be to persuade her to take them in while their weak-willed father travels through the South hawking scrap iron to pay the medical debts of his late wife.
Will the boys survive the ordeal unscathed or will they become damaged like their father, their mobster uncle Louie, their psychologically speech-impaired aunt Gert and, most especially, their emotionally stunted, 35-going-on-15 child-woman aunt, Bella?
By all rights, Jay and Arty should be the focus of Lost in Yonkers or perhaps steely Grandma Kurnitz. But thanks in no small part to a beautifully modulated performance by Fig Chilcott as Bella, she steals the play away from the others and, as she learns to stand up for herself and reach for some personal happiness, steals the audience’s heart.
Simon had been churning out comedy hits for 30 years by the time he also garnered critical and institutional acclaim with Yonkers, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama as well as the best play Tony Award. He had long felt under the shadow of such “serious” playwrights as Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, and there are echoes of The Glass Menagerie in Grandma Kurnitz’s manipulation of her crippled daughter.
This Dramaworks production is helmed by Julianne Boyd, the recently retired founding artistic director of (Massachusetts’) Barrington Stage Company, who stresses the reality in these stressed-out characters. The result is a touching truthfulness that also yields lump-in-the-throat laughter.
Most of the seven cast members are making their Dramaworks debut, with the standout exception being Laura Turnbull (Grandma). We hear about her before we see her, and her first entrance is preceded by the ominous thumping of her cane. Although her face will be frozen in a perpetual scowl, she manages to express wordlessly the tough love beneath the surface.
Much of the play’s narrative rests on the shoulders of the two boys, and Will Ehren (Jay) and Victor de Paula Rocha (Arty) handle those chores with charm and ease. The rest of the cast is fine, but it is Chilcott’s Bella — a woman whose mind may to “closed for repairs,” whose yearning for love you are likely to find irresistible.
Over the course of its quarter-century, Dramaworks has forged a reputation for savvy play selection and first-rate design. Both are evident in its embrace of Lost in Yonkers, as the West Palm company heads into its next 25 years.
LOST IN YONKERS, Palm Beach Dramaworks, 201 Clematis St., West Palm Beach. Through Sun., Nov, 23. $92. 561-514-4042 or palmbeachdramaworks.org.