performance

Theatre J presents a gritty, vital “Yonkers”

By Gary Tischler

November 2009

Tana Hicken and Holly Twyford

Neil Simon’s play “Lost in Yonkers” is in many ways all about coming of age. It’s a play about coming of age for many of its characters, not all of whom are young. For Simon — Broadway’s king of comedy — it was a final and true coming of age, a capstone on being at last seen as a serious playwright, a process that had begun with “Brighton Beach Memoirs.”

“Yonkers,” dark, even cruel, but still oddly warm and funny, got the Pulitzer Prize and Tony and affirmed Simon’s status among America’s finest playwrights.

Theater J’s production of “Lost in Yonkers,” superb, moving, funny, and tough with a boatload of fine actors, is also a further coming of age step, an ongoing process for the theater and its artistic director Ari Roth. It takes a certain kind of moxie to take on a play that’s memorable for the honors it’s received, and what some might consider definitive (and Tony Award-winning) performances by the likes of Mercedes Ruehl, Irene Worth and Kevin Spacey.

Yet this production, directed by Jerry Whiddon, loses nothing in the re-telling, the re-doing, the revival. If the space at the JCC doesn’t allow for big audiences, it gains something in intimacy, so much so that soon enough, you begin to feel that you’re a part of the 1940s Jewish family whose touchstone is the icy, steely, querulous and unbending matriarch who’s simply known as Grandma. You’ll know and remember your own family, whether it’s with relief or uncomfortable familiarity.

While the members of this clan are decidedly Jewish, they’re decidedly everybody too, it’s thick and rich in characters that are full-bodied, complicated, and, most importantly, wounded, scratching the scars, trying to heal.

In Grandma, Simon created a character that’s confounding for an audience, scary, cruel, manipulative, horribly emotionally scarred herself, and unsympathetic. Her face is always set aside from any attempt at affection, she fends off touches, hugs, and kisses as if they were bodily assaults. And she rules and haunts the rest of the family. All of her children have been traumatized by her to some degree, crippled a lot or a little: the aunt that can’t complete a sentence, Louie, a gangsterish bagman, and most of all, Bella, the shining, life-affirming, ice cream sundae-making heroine, child-like and afflicted..

We see the family during the course of a summer through the eyes of her frightened but eager nephews Jay and Arty, who’ve been left in the care of Grandma because their father, in debt and in mourning after the death from cancer of his wife, is traveling the South working sales jobs.

To the boys — superbly performed with energy that catches boyish adolescence honestly by Kyle Schliefer (Jay) and Max Talisman (Arty) — Grandma is scary, untouchable, like a living ghost in the house. They adore Aunt Bella, of course, because she’s sweet, full of love, eager to catch the sun on a daily basis, and they watch as she battles Grandma.

In the midst of all this, Uncle Louie (played with tough bravura by Marcus Kyd) arrives, obviously on the lam from other crooks. And the battle between Grandma and Bella ensues.

In Tana Hicken and Holly Twyford, two near-legendary and award-rich Washington actresses, this production has actresses worthy to stand beside Worth and Ruehl, there’s no loss in quality, only addition.

Hicken, thin, flinty, all edges, walks around the stage with a cane and she uses that cane as a tool to control her world, she gets from here to there, but she also pokes, sweeps, wields it like a weapon, to hold people at bay. She has her own wounds — an immigrant from Germany, she saw her father killed by a mob and she lost two children to disease. Those losses have closed her up, as if her body were a cave in which her soul lies frozen.

Twyford plays Bella with a radiant insistence, she knows herself painfully and acutely, and yet she insists on having a life, grabbing affection, satisfaction, respect and experience in ways she can handle. She’s grandly brave, there’s an appealing stubbornness about her. She has a shining, warm spirit around which the rest of the family often gathers to escape the chill of Grandma.

The production is dead on — from the worn set dominated by a pullout couch, to the family dynamics to the intimacy it radiates, which is both alluring and discomfiting. The play has its funny moments — Simon will have his chuckles — but it has honest power, without the aid of cheap sentiment.

You’re invited to get “Lost in Yonkers.” It will hurt a little, but it’s worth the visit.

(“Yonkers” runs through Nov. 29 at Theater J).

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