‘Lost in Yonkers’ – A Masterful Production of a Great American Drama at Palm Beach Dramaworks

 

As the first play of their 25^th anniversary, Palm Beach Dramaworks has filled a gap in its repertoire; a play by Neil Simon -- among the greatest American playwrights.  He is normally thought of as an entertaining playwright for stage as well as screen.  Can a playwright be serious and entertaining as well?  PBD’s production demands our consideration of Neil Simon as being among the company of Eugene O’Neil and Tennessee Williams, reaching deep into the human pathos, although still finding the humor, which makes this serious drama unique.

 

Several years ago the Maltz Theatre presented the first of his “Eugene Trilogy” his most autobiographical work, Brighton Beach Memoirs. Although not part of the Trilogy, Lost in Yonkers is similar in many ways, but more about the struggle to survive in a dysfunctional family and tipping more into serious drama. 

 

The intimacy of the Palm Beach Dramaworks theater brings the audience into the living quarters above the family’s 'Kurnitz's Kandy Store' in Yonkers.  No Broadway production could replicate this feeling; it is part of the company’s recipe for constant success. 

 

The play begins shortly after Pearl Harbor, and the breathtaking set reflects the personality of the protagonist, Grandma Kurnitz, aged and worn.  But don’t cross Grandma by being careless with the elements of this time capsule, right down to the antimacassars on the couch, or you will likely feel her cane.

 

Julianne Boyd, founding artistic director of the acclaimed Barrington Stage Company, makes her PBD directorial debut, balancing high wire dramatic moments with Simon’s unique gift, especially in this play, for using humor to move the plot along, not only jokes to relieve the tense moments.  She has the benefit of outstanding talent in this production, many in their debut roles at Palm Beach Dramaworks.  Boyd embraces the multiple layers and story lines of the play, making each character a central player, each “lost” in his or her own way.   

 

Will Ehren, Victor de Paula Rocha, Fig Chilcott, Patrick Zeller, and Laura Turnbull

One of the leading actors of the South Florida stage, Laura Turnbull, who has played in many PBD productions, has the central matriarchal role of Grandma Kurnitz, emotionally damaged to the point of cold cruelty towards her family, reflecting the past traumas from her Nazi Germany childhood and family tragedies.  Grandma Kurnitz’s hardness has caused lasting damage to those around her.

 

Turnbull’s portrayal of her character’s steeliness towards her family cuts deeply, and each one finds a way of dealing with it.  Her mastery of a thick German / Yiddish accent is utterly authentic, giving further gravitas to her character’s imperiousness.  Yet Simon’s depiction of Grandma leaves room for Turnbull to find her character’s humanity and ultimately her vulnerability.  It is a master class of acting.  Survival is the bottom line for her character and children will listen.

 

Start with her son, Eddie, who recently lost his wife to cancer and suddenly must find a high paying job in the south during WWII selling scrap iron to pay off his debts, mostly incurred during her end of life care.  Lacking options, he needs to find a place for his two sons to live while he is away.  Out of dire necessity, he has to turn to the place of his own emotionally damaged upbringing. 

 

Eddie is played by Patrick Zeller (PBD debut), with a deeply emotional, tearful anxiety which acutely affects the audience.  His performance is so conflicted that you can feel the helplessness and pain of his character, in that moment of desperation.  His repressed anger is tangibly evident as he listens to his mother’s initial rejection, with his back turned to her and the audience with a clenched fist.

 

Grandma Kurnitz is forced to capitulate and Eddie reluctantly leaves his two teenage sons, Jay, 15, and Arty, 13, with his mother, knowing that they will have to navigate her unwelcoming world with little emotional support as he had to.  Jay’s and Arty’s resourcefulness and adolescent humor demonstrate that hope can be found even in the most difficult of circumstances.  

 

Will Ehren (PBD debut) as Jay, displays his character’s broad range of emotions, quick to be a jokester, but fundamentally serious, and feeling the responsibility to protect his father by going along with the unthinkable – living with Grandma –while also protecting his younger brother, Arty.  Ehren’s acting abilities run the full range from comic to high drama, with his malleable features and deep-felt acting resources.  

 

Victor de Paula Rocha (PBD debut) as Arty, the 13 year old younger brother, is a study in contradictions.  While de Paula Rocha’s interpretation of his character’s sense of innocence and humorous mischievousness provides levity throughout the play, his role nevertheless is packed with subtle moments of lingering grief.  His eyes often communicate more than the dialog.  It’s clear that he matures quite a bit living with his intractable Grandma.

 

Will Ehren, Fig Chilcott, Victor de Paula Rocha

Over time, the two brothers establish strong relationships with their Aunts and Uncle, and learn lifelong lessons about family and resilience from their Grandma, not to mention their loving relationship with each other which is sometimes tested.  Yet, they never lose their bond.  They are on stage for practically the entire play, and their performances reveal much of the drama and heartbreak.

 

Fig Chilcott (PBD debut) as Bella is at the play’s emotional core and Chilcott unerringly embraces her role portraying the challenged but loveable younger sister who is desperate for love and longs to be held. 

 

Grandma had lost two children, one in infancy and another later in childhood.  It is part of her bitterness with the business of living.  Bella, at 35, is mildly retarded due to having scarlet fever as an infant and her mother is militantly overprotective, Bella seemingly condemned to a life of dependency.  It is she who wants Jay and Arty to move in so she can give them the love which has been suppressed all her life. 

 

And she is longing to receive love, finally thinking she’s found it after meeting an usher at a Movie Theatre, who is also mentally challenged, one she wants to marry.  Chilcott’s delivery of Bella’s key monologue, announcing her intention, in front of the entire family is breathtakingly poignant.

 

This is the stuff of great drama.  And Chilcott is just the actor to deliver the goods.  You believe her. 

 

Chilcott’s portrayal clearly demonstrates Bella’s development in the play from childlike to one of a more confident person, yet still comporting herself with a sense of innocence and truthfulness, saying to her mother: Maybe I’m still a child but now there’s just enough woman in me to make me miserable.  We have to learn how to deal with that somehow, you and me…And it can never be the same anymore.

 

Victor de Paula Rocha and Jordan Sobel-

Eddie’s brother, Louie is a gangster on the lam, but he is engaging, and milks the laughs as his sister Bella is impatient to make her announcement and he has an eye out the window for thugs pursuing him.  Jordan Sobel’s performance is full of machismo and oozes confidence, but the audience reads the fear lurking behind the mask.  Things are closing in on him.  He exaggerates his tough guy act to cover up his vulnerability.  It’s clear he loves his siblings and even his nephews who in a bullying moment try to teach them a few lessons about life.  His confrontation with Jay over the contents of his black bag is a high dramatic moment.

 

Louie’s exchange with his mother, when she refuses to take his “dirty” money, unearned and stolen from others, is Sobel’s shining moment: You can’t get me down, Ma.  I’m too tough.  You taught me good.  And whatever I’ve accomplished in this life, just remember – you’re my partner. 

 

Fig Chilcott, Will Ehren, Victor de Paula Rocha and Suzanne Ankrum

Suzanne Ankrum plays sister Gert, amusingly squeezing out the humor of a psychosomatic disability symbolic of the smothering effect of her mother’s cruelty.  When she speaks, the first part of the sentence sounds normal but then as she completes the sentence she sucks in her breath to the point of becoming breathless.  Ankrum effectively presents the playwright’s humorous construct while still expressing some of the play’s serious themes.  At least she has partially escaped Grandma’s orbit, having moved away into her own apartment.

 

This all culminates in those truths Grandma does not want to hear, and the play could have ended on that note, but this is Neil Simon and he finds a way to pull us back over the wall of unabashed tragedy into a healing rapprochement, and a reconciliation of the family.  Might there even be a slight smile on Grandma’s face?  After all, in spite of her harsh techniques, it has always been about the survival of family. 

 

This extraordinary production is a polished confluence of a great play, a Director infusing pacing and spirit, superb acting, and a production staff second to none.  Multiple story lines are brought out, the boys’ maturation, Bella coming of age, and Eddie and Louis’ travails coming to a resolution, all going through transitions with Grandma cracking the cane (and even she learns a thing or two).

 

Scenic design is by Bert Scott, the stage having the quality of an old sepia photograph, allowing the costumes to stand out.  Scott had to find room for seven doors on the stage. The set even captures the verisimilitude of an apartment across the street through two windows, which also serve for audio and lighting.

 

Carolina Ortiz Herrera (PBD debut) provides the lighting design, letting the nature of the light through the windows delineate the passing of time, either during a day or seasons passing. The light in the apartment communicates a cozy feeling.

 

Sound design is by Roger Arnold.  His challenge is providing transitional sound while actors are changing between multiple scenes (and change they did quite frequently, as well as opening and closing the convertible couch), with some of those sounds an occasional radio broadcast about the war, another marker of the passage of time, and sounds that seemingly come through the open window, a freight train (especially when Eddie appears off stage in a spotlight reading his letters to his boys), the sounds of the city which rise and fall, and let’s not forget the requisite dog barking.

 

Costume design by resident costume designer, Brian O’Keefe, is nothing short of many (so many characters, so many changes,) and brilliant, to compliment the unique personalities of each character.  In particular the life affirming attire of Bella is always in contrast to an apartment from a by-gone era.  From Grandma’s authentic 1940’s dresses to Louie’s mob style outfit and Eddie’s wool suit, to Gert’s very stylish dress, we are swept back in time.  But the surprise is always Bella, who breezes in with a jaunty hat on her glowing dark curls with some colorful confection of a dress and the time appropriate shoes!  She is a bandbox!

 

Kudos to Jane Lynch, wardrobe supervisor and wig designer and hair stylist, perfectly so early 1940s.  And to the work of Amanda Quaid, the dialect coach, which I especially appreciated, having grown up a “New Yawka.”  Finally, to the Stage Manager, multiple award-winning Suzanne Clement Jones, who has been with PBD since it first occupied the Clematis Street location, huge credit for keeping this magnificent play humming along as intended. 

 

Palm Beach Dramaworks has opened its 25^th season with a blockbuster production of one of the best plays in the pantheon of American drama. 

 

Photos of actors by Curtis Brown 

 

Asheville Devastation

 

The above is a panorama photo from Chimney Rock, one I took when we first visited the Asheville area.  Lake Lure in the distance became a raging river through the town itself, totally wiped out by Helene.  The storm was preceded by three days of deluging rain.

 

That was taken before I was writing this blog. Our love affair with Asheville and the surrounding area was immediate.  Its beauty touched us deeply.

 

Asheville itself is an enclave of urban sophistication with its boutique shops, bookstore, wine bars, restaurants, and bohemian vibe.  At times we talked about living there, if not full time, buying a condo or small house tucked away in the mountains near Asheville.

 

We looked at properties, but did we want to take on that additional responsibility?  Instead, we began to rent for stays of up to a month or visit for a shorter time and stay at its iconic Grove Park Inn.  We rented condos and finally homes through a broker or AirBnB.  Each time was in different area, so we learned much about the local infrastructure, its highways and back roads, historical sites, its many places of natural beauty, stopping along the Blue Ridge Parkway to take in those sights.

 

 From nearly twenty years ago, I’m at Looking Glass Falls which is along the Parkway.   The water would have been over my head during Helene.

 

Our last visit was just a year ago.  There are other entries in these pages covering Asheville.

 

Could those images we’ve been seeing be the same towns and mountains we have loved to visit?  There are no words to describe them.  Biltmore Village had water ten feet high and then mud, destroying the Village that housed the workers who built the Biltmore Estate.  The Village in more recent years was made up of local shops and restaurants.

 

The devastation is incomprehensible, critical infrastructure so damaged that it will take a very long time to recover.  Meeting immediate needs is the first priority.  If I was younger, I’d load up our SUV with water and non-perishables and drive there.  I can do the drive in one long day, but to where as once you get south of Asheville with every road is blocked?

 

So we consulted their local online paper the ‘Asheville Citizen Times’, looking for “boots on the ground” organizations and learned that World Central Kitchen is already there, partnering with local charities such as Food Connection.  They have started a schedule of regularly distributing meals. 

 

That’s if residents can get to the distribution points.

 

Western North Carolina’s NPR station mentioned relief efforts that were being made as well by other organizations. 

 

Hope Mills Inc. relief work is truly immediate.  Those efforts are being made by volunteer pilots flying mostly helicopters and they’ve already made 400 flights into remote mountain communities.  They have collection points at nearby airports for donations of water, non- perishables, medicine, critical ones such as insulin.  Donations go for fuel and those supplies. As the organizer said in a post yesterday:  “Our pilots are kicking butt and delivering goods to the most treacherous areas you can land. They don't complain, they just do. What they are seeing is beyond explanation. They are heroes.”

 

Therefore, not being able to be there to help out, we made donations to both.  Maybe some readers will want to do the same to Hope Mills Inc. and World Central Kitchen.  Or another organization mentioned by NPR.

 

The photo below is from near the top of Mt. Mitchell, the tallest mountain east of the Mississippi and one of the places to visit along the Blue Ridge Parkway.  Although Helene was not a hurricane when it wrought its destruction in the mountains, Mt. Mitchell recorded a wind gust of 106 MPH.  It was the flooding though that did such apocalyptic devastation. 

 

 

Paul Auster’s Ethereal ‘Baumgartner’

 

I referenced this book in my prior entry and decided not burden an already long entry with a review.  Now that I’ve sat down with this lovely slender book in hand, this is not a formal “review” but, instead, an impression, and how it relates to my own life. 

 

Thankfully, I have not experienced a loss of a spouse, the main theme hanging over the protagonist, Sy Baumgartner who lost his wife, Anna to a drowning accident, after 40 loving years of being together.  She becomes almost a ghost which follows his next ten years.  It is a skillful memory novel, the author stepping into the past and then back to the present, and as a metafictional piece, into the process of writing, even giving Anna a voice from her poems and essays, and frequently blending Baumgartner the protagonist with the author, Auster.  There are so many tributaries he sets sails on, including his most personal one; a trip to Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine in 2017 which Auster had written about before and now reiterates as Baumgartner’s journey to find traces of his grandfather and his Jewish roots, but they are all skillfully connected. 

 

Three important characters fall into his life, Ed Papadopoulos, a seemingly ungainly new employee of the Public Service Electric and Gas Company, but a man with a heart of gold, and watch how he comes back into Sy’s life later in the novel.  Judith, the first woman he allows himself to love after dealing with such a prolonged bereavement, and, finally a young scholar, Beatrix Coen, who has discovered Anna’s work, wants to write her doctorate thesis on the thinly published poems, as well as her unpublished works and essays.  This gives Sy (and thus Auster) a reason for the next chapter in the book, one which is not there.  The book ends abruptly.  I have my ideas where that goes; yours may be different. I think Auster carefully thought through the unusual conclusion. As with his own his life, abrupt endings can be expected but not easily anticipated.

 

I said that there were also connections to my own life noted in my review of his novel, Brooklyn Follies.  There the main character (Auster as well) lived in Park Slope, as I did earlier in my life.

 

In Baumgartner his early adult years, where he connected with Anna, were on 85^th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam on NYC’s upper West Side, Mine were on the same street just off Columbus when I connected with my own wife-to-be, Ann.  Auster and I apparently missed each other by a year.  He doesn’t go into the detail about the UWS as he does about Park Slope in Brooklyn Follies, but the coincidence was a little eerie.

 

More significant, to me, the book serves as a wake-up call to finish my memoir, not that the story of my life or writing can compare to Auster’s, but we all share mortality and I think his later works reflect an acceptance of this reality.  When he (Baumgartner – now a retired philosophy professor -- and no doubt, Auster, who died only last April) has an epiphany about time running out, and the need to tie things together, Baumgartner thinks about a book he has not yet completed, interestingly entitled Mysteries of the Wheel.  He is seventy one while having this thought, daydreaming in his backyard, living in Princeton, now, about deceased friends, increasing memory lapses.  His writing is exquisite, greatly introspective and stream of consciousness, moving from amusing anecdotes to profundity, and he might as well personally be relating a cautionary tale to me:

 

Nothing to be done, he thinks, nothing at all. Short-term memory loss is an inevitable part of growing old, and if it’s not forgetting to zip your zipper, it’s marching off to search the house for your reading glasses while you’re holding the glasses in your hand, or going downstairs to accomplish two small tasks, to retriever book from the living room, and to pour yourself a glass of juice of the kitchen, and then returning to the second floor with the book, but not the juice, or the juice, but not the book, or else neither one because some third thing has distracted you on the ground floor and you’ve gone back upstairs empty-handed, having forgotten why you went down there in the first place. It’s not that he didn’t do those kinds of things when he was young, or forget the name of this actress, or that writer or blank out the name of the secretary of commerce, but the older you become the more often these things happen to you, and if they begin to happen so often, that you barely know where you are anymore and can no longer keep track of yourself in the present, you’ve gone, still alive but gone. They used to call it senility. But the term is Dementia, but one way or another Baumgartner knows, and even if he winds up there in the end, he still has a long way to go. He can still think, and because he can think, he can still write, and while it takes a little longer for him to finish his sentences now, the results are more or less the same. Good. Good that Mysteries of the Wheel is coming along and good that he has stopped work early today and is sitting in the backyard on this magnificent afternoon, letting his thoughts drift wherever they want to go, and with all the circling around the business of short term memory, he is beginning to think about long-term memory as well, and with that word, long, images from the distant past star flickering in a remote corner of his mind, and suddenly he feels an urge to start foraging  around in the thickets and underbrush of that place to see what he might discover there. So rather than go on looking at the white clouds and the blue sky and the green grass, Baumgartner shuts his eyes leans back in his chair, tilts his face toward the sun, and tells himself to relax. The world is a red flame burning on the surface of his eyelids. He goes on breathing in and out, in and out, inhaling the air through his nostrils, exhale through his partially open lips and then, after 20 or 30 seconds, he tells himself to remember.

 

And so I try “to remember” writing what is tentatively entitled “Explaining It To Me.”  It is a race with time to finish and publish it so it may accompany the ones I’ve already published, Waiting for Someone to Explain It: The Rise of Contempt and Decline of Sense, my 2019 book dealing with my times’ social, political, and economic breakdowns, and Explaining It to Someone: Learning From the Arts, published in 2020, a collection of hundreds of my theatre and book reviews, which might suggest some answers from our writers and playwrights.  “Explaining It To Me” will be personal and therefore even more challenging to write and finish.  Maybe I can complete and publish it next year if there is enough time to “forage around in the thickets and underbrush.” I have a first draft but it needs much more work and there are so many appointments to keep.