Review of Lost in Yonkers, Hartford Stage
The tensions of family life in the 1940s get a revisit in this revival of Neil Simon’s popular period play, Lost in Yonkers, winner of both a Pulitzer and a Tony in 1991. At Hartford Stage, Marsha Mason, a four-time Oscar nominee (who has memorably played a number of Simon roles and was married to the playwright for a decade), stars as the matriarch of the Kurnitz family. Mason fully inhabits the role of an unsympathetic termagant who, oddly enough, runs an ice cream and sweets parlor and lives in the apartment above it.
Marsha Mason as Grandma Kurnitz, Gabriel Amoroso as Arty in Lost in Yonkers, at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson
The production also benefits from Mason’s participation as co-director, along with Rachel Alderman who directed the very winning contemporary family comedy Cry It Out at Hartford Stage in 2019. How the duties of co-directors fall is anyone’s guess, but my guess is that Mason’s participation means this production is close to the vision of the play as conceived by Simon. Which means, in practice, no ham-fisted efforts to “update” the play into our present. The play’s greatest strength is in its recall of bygone times, as links to the world of Grandma Kurnitz continue to fade away.
It's wartime—1942—and Grandma Kurnitz’s son Eddie has to find a place for his two boys to stay so that he can take a job that will let him pay back the loan shark he owes for the costs of his deceased wife’s cancer treatments. That backstory comes fully into focus as Eddie, played with affecting fatherly panache by Jeff Skowron, pleads nervously with his sons to try to win over their unpleasant grandmother—a woman he himself has mostly avoided since his marriage—so he can realize his plan. It’s kind of do or die.
Hayden Berry as Jay and Gabriel Amoroso as Arty in Lost in Yonkers, at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson
The boys, 15 and 13, are played as timid when around adults and a bit more likely to be sarcastic when together. The younger, Arty (Gabriel Amoroso), is the one more likely to land zingers and Amoroso does a good job with his timing and the pitch of his voice. As we see in one charming moment, Arty’s got moxie. As the elder boy, Hayden Bercy doesn’t get to be as pithy and some of his lines lose rhythm and get swallowed. It’s not unlike how nervous teens often speak and so fits as part of his characterization.
Sharing the apartment is Eddie’s sister Bella (Andrea Syglowski), a thirtyish woman who acts at times more childlike than the boys. In the old days, friends might just call her “ditzy,” but she’s meant to be developmentally stunted, a situation that is sort of “explained” by the anxiety of growing up as the baby girl of Grandma Kurnitz. It’s a role that is charming in its energy and spirit, and Syglowski makes the part her own. Key to that is the fact that Bella is amorphous, sometimes surprisingly adult, sometimes insistent as only a petulant child can be. Her attempts to grow beyond her mother’s assumptions about her limitations is the main secondary plot to the boys’ plight of simply trying to maintain.
Jeff Skowron as Eddie and Andrea Syglowski at Bella in Lost in Yonkers, Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson
The story is told through the boys’ eyes, so they become somewhat passive observers and we don’t learn anything they don’t. Relevant to that limitation is another subplot provided by their Uncle Louie who shows up at the house to lay low while some moblike individuals are out to find him. His actual activities, which the boys can’t really imagine, don’t get fully illuminated and we, like the boys, have to take Louie as we find him. It’s a plum featured actor part and Michael Nathanson makes the most of it, striding about before the boys as both tough and mysterious, full of his own long litany of abuse from “ma” and his sense of how the family dynamic works, including his read of their somewhat squeamish and well-meaning father. Louie’s engaging time onstage becomes magnified by the curiosity and skeptical awe with which the boys view him.
Gabriel Amoroso as Arty, Hayden Bercy as Jay, Michael Nathanson as Louie in Lost in Yonkers, Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson
A smaller part goes to the other sister, Gert, victim of a somewhat cruel gag by Simon: she has a speech impediment—more like a breathing impediment—that mostly occurs when around her mother. The initial titters as Libya Vaynberg, very game in the role, enacts the comic tic soon become strained. It might help if Gert were given some good lines but Simon seemed to think they’d be drowned in the laughter at the voice.
Finally, Mason. Grandma Kurnitz is a good role for Mason to play at this time in her life as a role that requires full maturity. Grandma Kurnitz is no secret softie waiting for the right mix of family hijinks to expose her heart of gold. She’s what is often called “a force of nature.” She does soften as the play goes on, but only slightly. More to the point, she comes to see that her version of things isn’t the only version, and that tends to be a lesson one learns from one’s children’s children, not from their parents. That’s very much the case here.
A key factor in the boys’ time in Yonkers is seeing how Jay helps Bella stand-up to her mother, joined by the fact that Grandma sees in Arty someone who can tell the truth, rather than flatter or dissemble. Which is to say that, no thanks to her, the kids are alright and if she wants to see that ship before it sails out of sight she best change her tune, at least a fraction. And that’s a good moral for a grandparent to learn in a three-generation tale.
Marsha Mason as Grandma Kurnitz in Lost in Yonkers, Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson
In the end it’s about that old line from Robert Frost: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Bella, Louie, Eddie and his two sons: they all make a home of necessity with Grandma Kurnitz, a woman whose own traumatic backstory and personal losses mean that she herself has not been at home, as in comfortable and happy, in a long, long time. The great fortitude in the character—which Mason brings out so tellingly—is that she doesn’t expect to be or believe she deserves to be. Life is hard and it doesn’t make sense, in her view, to try to make it easier for others out of kindness. They need to be able to cope. It’s a view of things that, from the U.S. perspective, has always been “old world.”
That world gets older all the time. It’s not that Simon’s script from the 1990s is nostalgic for those times—at all. It’s just that there’s no getting around where you come from and what those kin who were here before you were up to. In its fond, wise-cracking way, Simon’s play pays tribute to the great duress—the War—that made strange bedfellows of three generations.
Lost in Yonkers
By Neil Simon
Co-Directed by Marsha Mason and Rachel Alderman
Scenic Design: Lauren Helpern; Costume Design: An-Lin Dauber; Lighting Design: Aja M. Jackson; Original Music & Sound Design: Broken Chord; Wig & Hair Design: Charles G. LaPointe; Dialect Coach: Patrick Mulryan; Dramaturg: Victoria Abrash; Production Stage Manager: Kelly Hardy
Cast: Gabriel Amoroso, Hayden Berry, Marsha Mason, Michael Nathanson, Jeff Skowron, Andrea Syglowski, Liba Vaynberg
Hartford Stage
April 7-May 1, 2022