by Jen Eames
Now onstage at the Blue Slipper Theatre in downtown Livingston, Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” shines with youthful talent and a seasoned cast of local stage veterans.
The piece is set in Depression-era Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and the family we meet are Russian Jews who have escaped the looming threat of Nazism in their homeland. Their blended family contains three struggling adults and four painfully typical adolescents packed into a tiny flat.
The set is replete with portraits of ancestors, a wall of stories behind the one we view. The small stage of the Blue Slipper accommodates the cramped quarters of the Jerome home by using cutaway walls and half-windows to allow the audience visual access to their most intimate family moments. Lighting is another device of this peek within; as the monologues-as-memoir entries unfold within the scene, the speaker is insulated by spotlight.
The plot is carried by the youthful observations of a budding writer or Yankees baseball star (whichever comes first) Eugene Morris Jerome. This engaging narrator/memoirist in the throes of young lust and the confusion of the tumultuous times offers his wry perspective on the unfolding dramas surrounding him. Sleeping Giant Middle School eighth-grader Nathan Snow nails Eugene’s teenage emotional oscillations of exhilaration, frustration, perplexity and optimism in the context of a very challenging and rapidly changing world. Snow’s awkward earnestness and uncertainty capture the essence of the precipice-upon-a-precipice of coming-of-age on the eve of world war, with all the flailing cluelessness and humor to make his character completely believable. When it rolls downhill in his family dynamics, it rolls to Eugene, and he turns it all into story.
One of playwright Simon’s obvious strengths lies in illuminating the delicate structure of familial bonds, in this case, the humor, unconditional love and tolerance within a family that buffer it from the winds of war and the near-crippling poverty of the times. The strongest example of this bond in the script is the relationship between Eugene and his older brother, Stanley, played by another local youth with significant talent, Micah Price.
Stanley is Eugene’s mentor and closest friend, and Eugene takes all his cues of what it means to become a man from his brother to both comic and stirring effect. The puberty pep talk between Eugene and Stanley is one of the most bizarre, yet intimate and heartwarming moments in the play, a facet of sibling bonding that is usually not highlighted in family reminiscences. The handed down facts-of-life speech from the straight-talking older brother pulls no punches in its practical advice, and in the hands of less sure actors could have unraveled into silliness. Snow and Price make the scene work, creating a consistently authentic relationship in which protection and guidance outweigh struggle and conflict, all of this heavily doused with black humor.
Downstairs, mother Kate (Peggy Weisgerber) sighs and frets with overbearing nurture, a bluster of love and panic intermingled. Her widowed sister Blanche (Faye Christiansen) with her two teenage daughters further burden this household teetering on the brink of destitution, and Kate, as the woman of the house, holds it all together with either a fierce command or a well-timed guilt trip. “Worriers marry fainters,” she proclaims of her marriage.
Sister Blanche is a source of both resentment and pity for Kate, and the necessity of their close living arrangement is a natural catalyst for conflicting feelings to ignite into flames of hostility or, in Eugene’s case, unbridled lasciviousness toward his cousin, a blooming would-be starlet Nora (Sandy Barlow). The addition of Nora’s own adolescent angst spilling over into petulant pouting and stormy assertions of independence are fuel for the growing fire. Her coddled, conveniently sickly sister Laurie, played with wide-eyed innocence by Audrey Laviolette, is a fixture on the couch, where her fear and helplessness are confirmed daily by the doting mothers.
Despite all this turmoil at home, father Jack (Scott Black), the pained patriarch of seven straining under the extra costs of extended family still manages to keep a cool head, work two jobs, and dispense both fatherly and avuncular advice to his sons and squealing-mad niece Nora. As Jack, Black, a regular of local stages for years, presides over this cast of chaos with a quiet dignity and gravitas. His lines provide the morals and structure of the play, as well as the possibility of seeing hope for any of these young people to succeed in their adult lives.
The integrity of the family comes from Jack’s persistence and strength of conviction, although his material reality stretches him to the breaking point. He asks his son Stanley, threatened by a sacking for standing up to a boss who discriminates against a co-worker, “Can this family afford principles right now?
On the edge of war and threatened by poverty, the father and son relationship is stripped-down, immediate, and brutally honest. It is this honesty that ultimately challenges and inspires the audience to recognize those slices of life as their own, that Eugene is a voice of one story, but that these elements are familiar to us all.
Director Bill Koch says “Simon gives an audience real insight into the world of family in America; it doesn’t matter what triumphs or failures we encounter, when the dust clears, we all long for family.”
The dust that clears in this play is practically a tornado.
Brighton Beach Memoirs continues at the Blue Slipper Fridays and Saturdays through March 15 at 8:15 p.m., with Sunday matinees at 3:15 p.m. on March 2 and 9. For reservations and information, call the theatre at 222-7720.