Although it revolves around a single house and a single family, Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs contains enough material for four or five separate plays. Part heartfelt drama, part analytical comedy, the piece covers the space of about a week in 1937. Yet Simon's short timeline and taste for neat resolutions can't defeat a feeling that each of his seven characters deserves a couple acts of his or her own. Even the most obviously typed are attended by a wealth of detail and imply back stories that reach far beyond Simon's script. It also helps that even the most flawed of them attain a degree of likability.
This didn't make Brighton Beach Memoirs quite the hyperactive ride that the Barnstormers' last foray into the world of Neil Simon, The Good Doctor, offered back in 2006. However, as directed by junior Oleg Shik, the troupe's first show of the new year achieved not only moments of wit and depth, but an occasional fusion of the two. Though the work revolves largely around the perspective of one character - a boy named Eugene Jerome, the author of the titular memoirs - there wasn't a domineering player, or a weak link, in the Barnstormers' cast. Last weekend's show was blessed with the kind of balance and coordination that Simon's small setting and ambitious characterizations warranted.
The first scene finds young Eugene (sophomore Eric Levitz) fantasizing about professional baseball while his family goes about its quiet business. Aside from Eugene's solicitous mother Kate (senior Julie Sihilling), the earliest scenes are inhabited by Eugene's quiet Aunt Blanche (sophomore Emily Daly) and his pampered cousin Laurie (junior Molly Schindler). The two of them were left penniless by the death of Blanche's husband and have become quiet fixtures in the Jerome household. As the day progresses, more members of the family filter in - Blanche's rebellious older daughter Nora (sophomore Erica Bauman), Eugene's older brother Stanley (sophomore Richard Zheng) and finally, the overworked Jerome paterfamilias, Jack (senior Christopher Chuang).
Except for Laurie, none of these characters get to the final blackout without some sort of personal cataclysm. Nora dreams of a stage career, much to the displeasure of her mother. Yet Blanche herself yearns for independence from her relatives, while Kate's responsibilities have clearly begun to wear on her nerves. Stanley, though a nice guy and a hard worker, gets into trouble at his job. And Jack, already on the verge of collapse, is asked to negotiate everybody else's problems.
The staging wasn't particularly elaborate. Nor did it need to be. Although Brighton Beach Memoirs repeatedly alludes to Broadway and Nazi Germany, Simon fixated more on his individual personages than on their broader culture - making elaborate period decoration somewhat beside the point. Other than a radio, a coat stand and a few other props, the Arellano's stage was as simple as possible, painted a uniform black. A real Brighton Beach apartment probably wouldn't have looked so miserable - though even if the spareness and darkness was a heavy-handed reminder of the bleaker currents in Simon's script, it was an effective reminder nonetheless. But such scenery was also the perfect forum for Eugene's ruminations. In Levitz's hands, our guide to the Jerome household became a picture of solitary, half-contained energy. His readings of Eugene's memoirs had a rapid, obsessive, even suspicious quality that, somewhat unexpectedly, was a convincing fit for the pubescent narrator.
Few of the other players were given comparable passages of up-front comedy. Sihilling's Kate, for instance, scored laughs mainly by complaining about a local drunk and fussing over her housework. Nora and Blanche aren't particularly funny, and Bauman and Daly were wise enough not force humor into their roles. Yet they managed to make their characters both lively and appealing, almost in defiance of Simon's tiring mother-daughter intrigues. In the midst of all this, Schindler's quiet presence was pleasantly bizarre.
A fair measure of character typing should be expected from the man who conceived The Odd Couple. Also as with The Odd Couple, Simon's most confident work embraces a masculine milieu. Without Eugene's soliloquies, Jack and Stanley could easily come close to stealing the show. Fortunately, Chuang and Zheng interacted beautifully with the rest of the cast. They also pushed nicely against the beleaguered dad and self-confident son stereotypes that Simon probably had in mind, and that nonetheless open the way for some of the play's best exchanges.
Such a tendency towards generality, though, keeps Simon's anguished moments from satisfying. His dramatic scenes invite a troubling impression that another writer - like Eugene O'Neill, or maybe the guys behind The Wonder Years - could have pulled them off with more nuance and more art. Yet there is one indelibly awesome burst of emotion - an unexpected, near-violent argument between Eugene and Stanley. It was a chance for Levitz and Zheng to abandon the controlled tensions of the first act and deliver one of the night's best instants of onstage chemistry. And for the most part, Shik's production was another chance for Barnstormers doing what they do best - pick out a recent classic, and play its strengths for all they're worth.
