Lost in Yonkers (1993)
Director: Martha Coolidge

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It’s 1942 and Eddie Kurnitz (Jack Laufer), a New York City widower with two sons, has a chance to pay off in one year the $9000 of debt he racked up with a loan shark during his wife’s final illness. He’s lined up a job as an itinerant salesman of scrap metal in the deep South which he can take only if he’s able to park his sons Jay and Arty (Brad Stoll and Mike Damus) somewhere. The logical, if not happiest, choice is with his mother who lives in Yonkers.

Momma (Irene Worth) is a formidable German Jew devoted to order and maintaining the "steel" that she feels has ensured her survival in a malignant world. She isn’t the kind of survivor who is tough in a protective way so others won’t have to be. She thinks everyone in her family should imitate the way she’s hardened herself to meet hardship on its own terms. Having seen her father murdered by police at a political rally in Berlin where she herself was lamed by a policeman’s mount, she immigrated to the United States where, despite burying a husband and two of six children, she made a success of a neighborhood candy store and soda fountain. She raised her surviving children where their lives have been considerably less tumultuous than they would have been otherwise, but this doesn’t register with her. Her view of life is the opposite of progressive, beginning and ending with her set response to her experiences. She has contempt for everyone who isn’t like her and she doesn’t know anyone who is. She’s certainly not interested in playing warm, bosomy bubbeh to her grandsons.

Momma doesn’t have the final word, however. She lives with her youngest, Bella (Mercedes Ruehl), a mentally stunted woman in her late thirties whose sensuality contrasts with Momma’s Bessemer asceticism. Though Momma won’t acknowledge the signs, Bella is near the end of her rope living at home and serving as slave: when Bella’s not downstairs working in the shop she’s got to be within calling distance to cook and clean and rub Momma’s back when it gets sore (though it’s clear to Bella Momma’s back gets sore only when Bella is around to rub it). And Momma resorts to such infantilizing tactics as demanding Bella hand over a movie magazine that Momma insists was bought with her money, since she pays the wages. She says, "When I’m dead you can buy your own magazines," at which Bella yowls, "No, I won’t. Because when you’re dead you’ll still take them from me!" Bella and Momma differ most decisively with respect to maternity: Momma has the reputation of having destroyed all four of her children who survived to adulthood while Bella openly longs to be a mother. So when Momma decrees that Jay and Arty will not be staying with her, Bella throws down the gauntlet--if they go, she goes, and she knows Momma doesn’t want that, so that’s the decision.

The 1990 source play is the least literal of Neil Simon’s later memory plays. It draws on his own Depression-era childhood in New York and his feelings about the death from cancer in the early ’70s of his first wife, but it’s fully imagined, never sliding by on the self-enchanted nostalgia of the Brighton Beach trilogy ("Let me tell you how I became a great playwright."). In Lost in Yonkers Simon has elaborated the intriguingly unpleasant elements of Brighton Beach Memoirs and Broadway Bound --the mother’s almost supernatural detection of a purloined cookie in the former, for instance--into a family power struggle at once claustrophobic and grand, familiar and yet with a stylized literary compression you wouldn’t expect from him.

The mother unsuited for motherhood elicits a particularly sharp reaction from American audiences, and so is a rare figure, which may be in part why certain "serious" liberal melodramas, those leftish (The Little Foxes), "sensitive" (Ordinary People), and more fancily ironic (American Beauty) alike, have been overrated. In Lost in Yonkers Simon may think Momma is a round character because the exposition explains her ungivingness, but for me she works because of the way Simon has exaggerated her in fairy-tale terms, an effect enhanced by the movie’s director, Martha Coolidge. 1   For instance, we first see the candy store as the wide-eyed boys enter it. It’s shining with a golden light and is no less tempting than the gingerbread house to Hänsel and Gretel.  2   Later when the boys, thinking Grandma is asleep, joke about cutting off her braids and selling them to the army as barbed wire, and she, having heard them through the walls, walks up to their bed and says that any little boys caught messing with her braids will have their fingers cut off, we’re in the morbidly fearful imaginings of Struwwelpeter. Irene Worth is not macabre enough to do the conception full justice, and the naturalism she displays instead is a little starchy in its stage precision, but the ogress rises before us all the same. And you could also say that the disparity between Worth’s performance and the malignant literary conception helps keep clear that Momma is being viewed by boys bereft of their own mother 3   (who before her death was locked in mutual enmity with Grandma). From their knee-high starveling’s perspective she’s hoarding a treasure they’re hungry for.

Momma’s vigilance is so thorough that though immigration to suburban Westchester County has saved her from the external calamities visited on the European Jews, the bloodless grip with which she’s attempted to stop Fortune’s wheel has wrought havoc much closer to her. Her four children have all been distorted by their upbringing. Eddie, the boys’ father, had his spirit broken by Momma as a child when she would be disgusted by the tears she caused him. Ever since, she has shown distaste for his overly conciliatory manner toward her. Louie (Richard Dreyfuss), never a crier, responded in the opposite way, making a life of petty rebellion. He’s now a bagman for a local gangster. Gert (Susan Merson) has a nervous disorder that makes her breathe in harshly in the middle of a sentence. And we can see how Momma treats Bella, who seems the opposite of the mother she can’t escape: genetically unprepared for the world. Though Simon has said that he intended Bella’s handicap to have resulted from Momma’s treatment of her, 4   that handicap is not as clearly formulated or as readily recognizable an emotional maladjustment in realistic terms as the other children’s problems. Most people probably will assume she’s mildly retarded, but either way, Momma’s exploitation of Bella’s stuntedness to ensure herself help and companionship, which she is far too grim a survivor to repay with the merest sign of gratitude, is plain enough, and Bella’s mental incapacity functions even if taken in some unspecific symbolic way.

Bella’s condition does provide her with innocent compensations that the other siblings’ don’t. She’s childishly uninhibited, which Momma takes as proof of her inability to manage her own life, but which we, like Jay and Arty, come to see as necessary for Bella to reach beyond Momma’s world for kindness and gratification. Bella can, for instance, sit through the same movie repeatedly, and every time it’s as if the actors were in the theater performing just for that audience. True, she may speak as if the actors were literally in the theater, may forget what she has just been saying or such sensitive facts as the death of the boys’ mother, may walk right past the house absentmindedly (or subconsciously, and who can blame her), and you may feel some pain in seeing the way she tries to compensate for glaring slips in conversational sense or lapses of memory. But there’s also a kind of heroism in her affirmation of pleasure. For instance, when Bella insists that the boys be allowed to stay, she makes her defiant speech to Momma while getting bedclothes for the folding couch where they’ll sleep. Bella tells them to bring some precious memento, such as a photo of their dead mother, while dodging the old lady’s open-handed slaps. Bella’s body takes the corporal punishment while her attention focuses on the expected enjoyment of the boys’ company.

The poignant antithesis between the mother who hoards her bounty and the bountiful soul who will never be a mother is heightened in the movie version by including Johnny (David Strathairn), the forty-year-old movie theater usher whose condition resembles Bella’s and whom she hopes to marry. Neil Simon’s plays are very talky and they’ve been opened up fairly pointlessly in the past by excursions into the city, i.e., by depicting the exposition that we then get again as the exposition originally in the play. But the scenes Simon added of Bella with Johnny work far beyond expectations to establish Bella’s appetite for life. (No doubt the success of this opening up is due in large part to Coolidge, who is the first director who’s been able to limber a Simon adaptation up so that it blends into the life that the location shooting suggests going on around the play.)

The unlikeliness of two retarded adults in the 1940s getting to marry and have children ensures the melancholy edge to the scenes. But Ruehl is impractical optimism in the vibrant flesh, and Simon has dared to give Strathairn a few laugh lines, such as his disappointment over being rejected by the Army: "I couldn’t pass the ... the ... whatever they give you I couldn’t pass it." Strathairn’s stiffness also contrasts with surprisingly airy movements--at times his hands could be possessed by Harry Langdon’s--and the whole romance is pushed to a higher level of comic pathos. Later, when Bella goes to Johnny’s house and he balks at having her meet his parents, Ruehl and Strathairn get at the emotional remoteness of these handicapped love birds. They seem to be aware of their difference from other people and yet not fully to comprehend it (Strathairn especially), and it starts to feel like the human condition.

In addition to the confusion of whether Bella’s impairment is congenital or the result of abuse, another problem arises after Bella has failed to win the family’s approval for her marriage to Johnny and then found that Johnny can’t make the leap anyway. Bella hides out with Gert for a few days and then returns in an improbably clear-headed state to explain herself to Momma, who makes the scene into a melodramatic confrontation. In this final showdown Bella is more articulate about her feelings and her mental condition than the mental condition would seem to permit.

However, I have to pause here because it’s just caught up with me that a moment ago I said that something Neil Simon wrote feels like the human condition, a level I don’t feel he reached in any other play in his long career. And furthermore, I’m on the brink of saying that, more than ever before, he’s built his play up in a series of meaningful and perfectly poised theatrical peaks. Obviously, I’m no kind of a Simon fan and yet I have to admit that watching Lost in Yonkers is enriched by acquaintance with his body of work.

Although, generally speaking, I’ve liked Simon best when he’s least like himself (in his screenplay for Elaine May’s 1972 movie The Heartbreak Kid and his 1981 play Fools 5   ), his characteristic and conventional first play, Come Blow Your Horn (1960) showed precocious skill at lacing the conventions of farce with more pungent material. It’s about the liberation of two young men who work for their father at his wax fruit company, a symbolic producer of synthetic natures mortes. Alan, the older son, is a "bum" in his father’s eyes because he lives in a bachelor pad where he runs girls in and out, never looking to get married. The younger son, Buddy, who has been obediently living at home, provides the impetus for the action when he moves in with Alan and loses his virginity. There’s usually something curdled about the commercial comedies of this era, in which horny but unsexy guys drool over ludicrously stacked and shellacked playmates. 6   The central characters and the writers seem like squares telling off-color jokes, in a witless compromise between farce and burlesque. There’s some of that in Come Blow Your Horn (especially in the 1963 movie version starring an overaged Frank Sinatra), but what’s arresting in the play is the primal vigor of the boys’ Jewish parents. Simon saw the overwhelming, unmanning authority of the patriarch in the Jewish family, and staged it in an appropriately withering comic idiom.

It isn’t just that Simon has Alan the hipster instantly lose his cool on sight of his father. Or his more brilliant stroke in making the father the most cutting, controlling of comedians himself, a man who dominates with wisecracks. Or even his insolently seeing a convergence between Jewish family and Jewish myth when Buddy first arrives at Alan’s and Alan says, "I’m proud of you. You walked out of Egypt, kid." What gives it its pop impact is Simon’s ability to emphasize with standard stagecraft the perversity of this supremely frustrating family culture. Expecting a date, Alan makes a little speech when he hears a knock at the door in order to impress Buddy with the wonder of life as a bachelor: "Ready for the thrill of your life? ... and my third wish, O Geni, is that when I open the door, the most beautiful girl in the world will be standing there." Instead, he opens the door to reveal his father, "scowling disgustedly," the negation of freedom and desire. A joke like this, later successfully repeated with the mother, telescopes Broadway comedy and Freud back into the prescriptive, punitive Jewish culture that produced the Ten Commandments and saw fit to turn a woman into a pillar of salt for an interdicted backward glance (just what a Jewish writer of semi-caustic memory plays must fear).

The opening of the door in Come Blow Your Horn is an ingenious emblem of the conflicts in the play. Simon’s next two original plays, Barefoot in the Park (1964) and The Odd Couple (1966), sought with some, but generally less, success the comic form for the discord between repressed orderliness and messy freedom. In these two works Simon may have lost some momentum by abandoning explicitly Jewish characters. He became a mass marketer of Jewish humor in its most assimilationist form, each play a Twinkie with the guts of a knish.

However, the larger problem came when he more consciously attempted to go "deep" by talking about feelings explicitly. Starting with Plaza Suite (1969) and The Gingerbread Lady (1971) and on through the Brighton Beach memory plays (1983, 1984, 1986), Simon tried to get at emotions more directly. It seems clear that at some point between 1960 and 1970 he felt caught out by the counterculture that made the kind of comedy represented by his first three plays obsolete. And since he was a former TV writer you can imagine that the only way he could advance comfortably was by roughening up the kind of comedy he was successful at, without losing the feel of comforting conventions. I would guess that Simon’s close collaboration in 1966 with that lissome nightcrawler Bob Fosse on Sweet Charity, a musical about prostitutes, must have pushed him in the direction he took after Plaza Suite. This is the same period in which Woody Allen made the transition from What’s New Pussycat? (1965) to Bananas (1971) and beyond. It’s a telling contrast: set Annie Hall next to The Goodbye Girl, both 1977 New York movies that Allen and Simon wrote at the same time for their actress partners, and you can see how much less convincingly Simon was able to update his outlook, style, persona.

What resulted in Simon’s stage plays was family trauma reshaped as formulaic commercial comedy, but without the snappy farce mechanics of Come Blow Your Horn. Plotting is definitely not his strong point. There’s a problem with the content in that the characters at climactic moments offer therapeutic exposition of each other’s personalities and their troubled relationships. You think, If the characters, speaking as they do like pop psychologists, could identify and articulate their conflicts so readily why can’t they steer clear of them? (Or, to look at it another way, if the pop psychology "insights" have so little transformative power then what good are they?) This also means that the plays are always about the relationships as Simon has conceived them. There’s no context, no depth, not only no larger issues, but no other issues at all. What his pull-string dolls say, in their unreverberant expository speeches, is all we get.

More famously, although Simon nakedly psychologized the conflicts more than any sit-com did at the time, he did it in a way that didn’t preclude a similar standardization of the characters’ speech. In both monologue and dialogue the staccato rhythm always leads up to the trademarked rueful-cynical wisecracks, and this predictable swing in the language predominates, even over plot, which, after the first three plays becomes strangely shapeless. The punchlines mark the work as his, but are completely inadequate to probe the antagonisms he’s set up. It might conceivably work if Simon had a gift for language in itself. But his gift is certainly not poetic, and so you can’t admire his having created an identifiable idiom because it only prevents his further developing his material.

This background makes Lost in Yonkers all the more remarkable as the only play of Simon’s in which the characters address emotions in head-to-head confrontations that convey the full emotional impact of what he’s getting at. The three peaks--when Bella outmaneuvers Momma, enabling the boys to move in; when she asks the family to consent to her marriage and they refuse; and when she returns home only to have Momma accuse her of theft--are very powerful, the last two devastating. This is in part because of judicious pruning of what in the play text is overexplicit in Simon’s usual manner. For example, Grandma’s line about her dead children, "I lost Rose, then Aaron, and I stopped feeling because I couldn’t stand losing anymore...," becomes onscreen, "I lost Rose, then Aaron ... I couldn’t stand losing no more...." (Simon has credited Coolidge’s emphasis on the difference between plays and movies with getting him to "cut tons and tons of big speeches out." 7 ) Merely stating the phenomenon is more plausible and allows us to think about it on our own later.

In addition, Lost in Yonkers is so good because, without losing his sense of humor, Simon is willing to face down the parental Gorgon. He doesn’t just identify a family problem, as he did in the Brighton Beach plays, he follows it through to the end in comic terms without seeking to make nice about it or safely enclosing it in psychological platitudes.

This last is important because there’s a relationship between Simon as purveyor of theatrical therapy for the big Broadway audience and the compulsive and compulsory reconciliation that limits his plays emotionally. No matter what family nightmares he depicts, or whether he depicts them as farce or straight drama, he’s always the good boy trying to assuage the family monsters, those guardians of his superego, for having dared to put his divided feelings on display, for feeling them at all. As he said about the opening of Broadway Bound in 1986, "The [Washington Post] review was so glowing with praise and affection that I felt overwhelmed. Still, I had fears. Did I write a good play and did I treat my parents fairly? I knew I’d been honest, but had I been fair? Since both were now gone, I didn’t want to be haunted from the grave, thinking that I betrayed my parents, invading the privacy of their own inner turmoil." 8   In his sneaky, tormented, intense 1999 play Chaucer in Rome, John Guare took as his subject this very guilt over having made a career in the arts of publicly confessing his parents of their sins. Simon never confronts it so directly; he doesn’t seem to think of himself as an artist exercising prerogative in his choice of subject. His habitual method has been to maintain a reassuring hedge of safety between the artist and the audience, even when he’s convinced he’s cutting down the last obstacles that separate us from him. (That’s the irony of platitudes--they permit completely impersonal and bloodless "revelation.") Simon will admit to pain and anger and resentment about family life, but won’t follow where they lead logically, which is beyond the curve of classic comic structure.

For instance, happy-comic endings do not exist in the same world as the realities of living with an alcoholic parent, as Simon tries to make them do in The Gingerbread Lady. He wants to score points for putting a realistically self-absorbed drunk of a mother at the center of his comedy but then shirks by having the mother and daughter "understand" each other at the end. (A revealing anecdote from the New Haven run of the play: in his memoirs Simon cites as a sign of his daring the fact that he had the main character say "fucking" in her entrance line and then tells us in the next breath that he cut the expletive because the first night audience gasped. 9 ) But there’s a more important issue than the obscene language. He needed to find the comedy, such as it is (and such as any meeting of AA will reveal it), in the realities of alcoholism. Instead he ends up pretending that it’s something it’s not--reformable by good intentions.

Thus, in order to get past his internal censors he sacrifices his chance to extend his command of comic form, which he could do only by simultaneously obeying the different demands of naturalistic observation. That is to say, he abandons the forge just when it gets hot. The result is the feeling that there’s nothing in this world family members can do so terrible that you can’t sentimentalize them. He’s trapped by the Jewish middle-class mindset that at some level he’s been driven to outrage. (In most of his output he has been one way and another all six of Momma’s children in one: rebellious but accommodating, addled and suffocated, and dead twice over.)

Finally, in Lost in Yonkers Simon doesn’t back down and even sets the struggle (internal and external) in a larger context. In their last, big confrontation Bella blames Momma outright for her children’s problems: "Thieves and sick little girls, that’s what you got. Only God did not make us that way. You did. You! We’re alive, but that’s all we are. Rose and Aaron are the lucky ones." Momma’s reply sets up a larger, tragic difference between mother and daughter than you’d been aware of up to this point when she replies to the unendurably painful last phrase, "It’s my punishment for being alive ... for surviving my own children ... Not dying before them is my sin." In this way Simon has written a family story that dramatizes this generational transition from those who attribute responsibility for suffering to God to those who attribute it to their parents.

What’s so rich for comedy about this transfer of responsibility is that from the children’s perspective there’s a confusion between Jehovah and their parents. The joke is that the concept of an ill-disposed, omnipotent overseer is inescapable: for unbelievers (or believers in analysis) the parent simply takes on all the attributes of the God you can’t believe in, while your lack of faith itself becomes another source of parental displeasure. This is of course arguably the most important transition of the modern era in terms of individual psychology, as well as one that crops up repeatedly in the Jewish-American family dramas of the twentieth century.

Thus, Lost in Yonkers has a lot in common with the 1927 Al Jolson movie version of The Jazz Singer, which melodramatizes the transition in values from the older to the younger generation, represented by the Orthodox cantor-father who disowns the son who’d rather sing jazz in nightclubs. In both this and Lost in Yonkers the older generation’s values, and their tyrannical enforcement of them, are based on adaptations for tribal survival that don’t apply in the new world anymore. This means further that neither script is as purely melodramatic as the head-on clash of values might lead you to expect. Melodrama requires that the opponents be judged within a single, simplistic framework of values (clearly identifiable good versus evil), and in both works the values are undergoing a shift.

Furthermore, melodrama classically features an innocent protagonist who is falsely accused and has to prove his or her innocence. In The Jazz Singer Jolson’s character is accurately accused of wanting to abandon his family’s traditional calling, it’s just that he doesn’t see it as an act of lèse majesté against the patriarchal tradition. How one feels about the son’s career choice is thus a question of interpretation, which leaves open the possibility of understanding the father’s position as well, though the story’s near relation to melodrama means that from the point of view of play mechanics the father is in the position of the "villain." Lost in Yonkers has far less mechanical resemblance to standard melodrama (though it does feature a false accusation against the innocent heroine) and follows the naturalistic bent of the premise more, which is to describe the disharmony within a Jewish family assimilating into the larger American culture. In Lost in Yonkers the younger outlook implicitly wins out because Simon offers psychological explanations of Momma’s cruelty.

There is a drawback to the further relaxation of the melodramatic formula in Lost in Yonkers, which is that it’s episodic. The play, and the movie even more so in the passages most opened up, bring on Uncle Louie to round out the effect Momma has had on her children. He sneaks back home one night to hide out when rival gangsters are after him, and we quickly see, and he tells us outright (filling in much of the background exposition), that he is the least crushed of the four siblings. Louie livens things up by taking his nephews swimming, playing poker with them, teaching them what "moxie" is. He’s clearly stuck in brazen reaction to his overbearing mother, and he’s also a bit of a warning to good boys. Nevertheless, we’re supposed to enjoy his casual unpredictability the way the boys do. The problem with these scenes is that they turn the story into an aimless and more usual coming-of-age-summer story. But Uncle Louie, lovable scapegrace, is also a problem in himself, even apart from Dreyfuss’s too warmly streetwise interpretation (Duddy Kravitz diminished to a Dead End Kid). Louie needs menace not moxie. This would make sense of his resistance to his mother, his criminal career, and his fierce disapproval of Bella’s engagement. In mitigation, though I didn’t enjoy Dreyfuss’s performance, the part is so poorly written that I wasn’t actively wishing I’d seen Kevin Spacey play it on Broadway.

Interestingly, the problem with these episodes is never with the boys themselves, either the characters or the child actors playing them. Simon and Coolidge are exceedingly alert to the moments when Jay and Arty are forced to process bewilderingly unpleasant family relations as comedy. (We obviously owe the material to Simon but should also remember the extraordinary performance Coolidge got from young Lukas Haas in Rambling Rose.) In the opening ordeal, when Eddie and then the boys themselves have to convince Grandma to take them in, as if they were trying to sell her suspiciously inexpensive slaves, the boys are whisker-sensitive with wariness. They know how important it is to succeed, and that you can’t be too careful when dealing with the kind of heinous old woman who asks things like, "Vitch one iss da smart one?" Grandma insists that their Americanized nicknames aren’t names at all, and so tells them she’ll call them Jakob and Artur, pronouncing them in German. Then when Grandma commands the big performance, "So tell me ... vy do you vant to live with Grandma?" (in a way that hints that if you get the answer wrong she’ll eat you, though as it turns out she eats her young no matter what they say or do) Arty turns to his brother and says, "Why don’t you tell Grandma, Yakob?" with a comic inflection on the name so subtle we don’t have to hear him use it again to imagine the running joke they could turn it into.

Mike Damus who plays Arty, in particular, has a delivery that is arch yet in a secretive way that could get by even someone as vigilant for insubordination as Grandma. (Her humorlessness is one of their surest allies.) And Simon has written for the boys some of his best punchlines, which are so good because they seem natural for the situation, rather than obligatory for the kind of hit comedy he’s famous for writing. When Bella tells the boys that she’s planning to get married and makes them swear not to tell Grandma, Arty’s assurance, "She and I have very short conversations," is so good you feel that years of experience couldn’t have improved Damus’s delivery.

Simon also shows us something even more unnerving in the relationship between self-preserving impudence and impairment in Gert’s breathing disorder. Jay and Arty arrive on the scene with typically cruel (but not unfunny) children’s jokes about both Bella’s and Gert’s handicaps, before developing new routines about Grandma as she intimidates and overworks and abuses them. During the harrowing scene when the family cannot comprehend, much less approve of, Bella’s desire to marry Johnny, Louie surprisingly attacks Bella so ferociously that Grandma doesn’t have to say anything. Gert on the sidelines is so bewildered all she can say is, "Can somebody please--explain all this to me," breaking her sentence with the exact violent intake of breath that Jay had imitated for Arty’s amusement at the beginning of the movie before we’d met her. In this later scene, what had been funny to the boys because they were too young to interpret it and thus saw only its superficial oddity, is suddenly made clear to us as a debilitating response to family life, and it’s painful. But then after this fiasco, when Gert, who is hiding Bella at her place, stops by and talks to the boys, Jay can’t help asking if there isn’t something the doctors can do about her affliction. Gert says, "I don’t have it that much. It’s mostly--(Sucks in)--when I come here," and the expressionism of the disorder’s kicking in just on that phrase makes it funny again, painfully funny, enough to make you laugh and cry at once.

By filtering the action through the boys’ eyes in this way the play further gets at the source of Simon’s career as a comic playwright. Brighton Beach Memoirs suggested how a tense home life could turn a smart kid into a defensive joker, and Broadway Bound showed the interaction of the brother comedy-writers (based on Neil and his older brother Danny who started out writing for TV in New York in the ’50s) and the family whose foibles they unconsciously use as material. But the teenaged hero’s direct address in Brighton Beach wasn’t barbed enough to protect him against his invasive mother, and the mother had to be "understood," forgiven, hugged.

In Lost in Yonkers Simon violates the overwhelming family authority, which in his career has compelled reconciliation at any aesthetic cost, by showing the young heroes saving themselves from family terror with comedy, which has sometimes also been part of the family inheritance. (It is in Come Blow Your Horn and The Sunshine Boys [1974], in which a nephew is tyrannized by his comedian uncle, though explicitly not in the Brighton Beach plays.) Simon has addressed the relationship of the tyrant and the tyrannized throughout his career without before daring to overcome his fear of parental disapproval. For him comedy has been a way of giving in to tyranny as much as evading it. When he said in his memoir, "I know I didn’t write Lost in Yonkers. It didn’t come from me. I saw the play a number of times and there’s no chance that I’m the author.... I listened in awe at the power of the words, and silently I said to myself, ’God, I wish I could write like that’," 10   it makes special sense. When an intuitive journey this deep inside an artist finds its aesthetic form it can come to seem like a journey outside himself into common human experience.

In the play version of Lost in Yonkers Simon gave Grandma a cute last line, telling the boys where she hides the money that Jay has been hunting for to get them out of her clutches. It’s somewhat better in the movie than on the page because she seems to enjoy the sadistic joke of having defeated them. But Simon added something else to the movie script: Bella walks out of the house one day and never returns. Of course, from one point of view this is simply tacking on a happy ending. But it’s conceived as neither Simon nor any other popular American writer or filmmaker would have conceived it before.

Psychologically almost no one can face the idea of such an extreme escape from parental authority, which may be why scenes of reconciliation ring so hollow in movies and yet are so common. Even in Now, Voyager, an absurdly rich pop version of mother-daughter conflict that lies behind Lost in Yonkers (it’s the movie that Bella is watching at the beginning), Bette Davis can’t escape her mother’s crippling insistence on propriety, even after the old dragon’s death--Davis and Paul Henreid must love each other only through his daughter, and through the ritual of his lighting her cigarette in his mouth. And the unpleasantness of the bad family dynamics that Now, Voyager permits itself is more permeating and convincing than in most movie mush. Generally, American pop culture caves in to the numbing and insatiable demand that conflict be permanently and comfortably resolved. But the ending of Lost in Yonkers is also for Simon an escape from reconciliation. The idea that you can walk out of the monster’s lair without a word, that you can grow up despite your parents, on your own authority, shows his willingness to open the final door. Lost in Yonkers thus has more temperament and fiber because Simon respected his own anger.

You might speculate that Simon could go this far because in this case both parent and child are female. I don’t think there’s any question that this accounts in part for the fact that Martha Coolidge is able to shoot the play with a vigor unmatched by any other movie version of Simon’s work, either adaptations or originals. Early on Coolidge has a shot of Mercedes Ruehl as Bella walking down a crowded sidewalk in which the rollingly alive actress helps transform the material. (Here, as in the scene of Laura Dern walking through town in Rambling Rose, Coolidge proves a wiz at this kind of girl-can’t-help-it stroll.) When Bella stops to holler at two underaged street boys who’ve made a suggestive comment to her, Simon the overemphasist has to end the scene with Bella’s saying under her breath, "But thank you for asking," whereas we could already see from her walk and grooming that she is also of another mind about her own earthiness. (The ’40s hair-dos and swinging, clinging dresses Shelley Komarov has put her in make Ruehl look splashy-ripe.) The performers are uneven--Ruehl, Strathairn, and Damus are all tops; Worth and Dreyfuss fall short--but Coolidge manages to keep up a level of emotional and comic and visual intensity without making the grotesque elements of the story repellent. The comedy and trauma come together in the way they did in one of the finest American play adaptations, Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 version of The Member of the Wedding. Coolidge and Simon raise each other to a new level for both. 11 

Simon is a strange figure because by almost any standard--success, influence, even to a degree merit--he’s a major figure, and yet he hasn’t written a single play besides Lost in Yonkers that’s anywhere close to being indisputable. If you look at him as one of the major Jewish jokers of his generation, along with Norman Mailer (b. 1923), Jerry Lewis (b. 1926), Mel Brooks (b. 1926), Lenny Bruce (b. 1927), Paul Mazursky (b. 1930), Philip Roth (b. 1933), and Woody Allen (b. 1935), all born and raised in one of the five boroughs of Manhattan or in New Jersey, Jewish-American culture’s ring of fire, you see him as part of a larger workshop that changed almost everything about American pop culture that African-Americans didn’t change. At the same time, Simon, the most successful over the longest period, is probably also the most assimilated, the least hip and really the least interestingly influential. (James L. Brooks has inherited the bulk of his talent for commercializing the contemporary tensions that other, better artists have brought into comedy.)

So you know why Michael Tolkin in his 1988 novel The Player has the rising hotshot executive Larry Levy say of his studio’s roster of directors, "We need more interesting people. We shouldn’t do business with anyone who’s ever directed a Neil Simon movie...." 12   But Lost in Yonkers is a more-than-distinguished cap to Simon’s career and not just a fluke but a culmination of ideas he’s worked on all along, if never so forcefully. And Martha Coolidge’s translation of the play to the screen certainly rates an exception to Larry Levy’s blackballing.

1. fairy-tale: For Coolidge’s comments on this aspect of the piece, see Simon, Illustrated Screenplay 15. (return to text)
2. candy store: In World of Our Fathers, Irving Howe described the candy store in Jewish neighborhoods as being an "informal social center" (209). Momma’s candy store is never that; the family life we see owes something to naturalism, but not the world outside it. (return to text)
3. boys bereft of their own mother: After Simon’s father left the family when Simon was fourteen, he and his mother moved in with cousins and ended up sharing a tiny room. As he has written, "For a fourteen-year-old boy to be sleeping in the same bed with his mother gave me more emotional scars than I like to think of. I literally slept in the small crack between the bed and the wall, for fear of touching her during the night" (Play 193). The dead mother and the invasive grandmother in Lost in Yonkers play out the anxiety about mother being either too close or beyond reach. (return to text)
4. intended Bella’s handicap: "She’s not retarded.... I think the mother kept her as a child through the force of her will" (Play 267). On the other hand, the screenplay includes the following comment: "It is clear that Johnny is much like Bella. Very slow and retarded to some degree" Illustrated Screenplay 66. (return to text)
5. least like himself: The projects that have taken Simon out of his milieu, or out of the atmosphere he developed in which comedy is a routinized resource against middle-class disappointment, have struck me as his funniest by far. Fools is set in a Ukrainian village in 1890 and has a good low premise: a teacher comes to town only to find that everyone has been struck dumb by a curse put on them by a Count who has been spurned by a girl in the town. Not only are the townsfolk ineducable, but if the hero remains in town more than a day without raising the girl’s intelligence, which is impossible, he will become stupid as well. It has a folkloric quality of amazement, as well as a romantic comedy plot--the teacher naturally falls for the same girl the Count wants. It limits Simon to vaudeville punchlines on a single premise, which could be considered his most irritating habit, but it keeps him from pushing the punchlines for his usual psychotherapeutic version of "truth." It’s all appealingly silly and with a recognizably artificial shape. The marriage plot, which involves tricking the Count in order to free the town from their stupidity, is both high and low, as if Molière had confected a divertissement around an extended pollack joke.
   The Heartbreak Kid, for which Simon wrote the script from Bruce Jay Friedman’s Esquire short story, is closer to his usual material. A Jewish New Yorker on his honeymoon in Florida falls in love with a shiksa from Minnesota and does whatever it takes to trade in his zaftig Jewish bride for the dream model. It feels different from Simon’s original scripts because although Lenny, the hero played by Charles Grodin, is harried, he isn’t depressed or defeated. That’s the joke--he’s buoyantly improvident. You don’t even have to identify with him in his hollow desperation to want to watch him play his hand. And perhaps because May directed, the dialogue scenes are looser, allowing for the superb revue-style work of Grodin and Jeannie Berlin. The actors don’t feel forced into attitudes by Simon’s usual counterpunching exchanges.
        And among what are considered Simon’s classic plays I like the opening of Biloxi Blues (1984) because he had to adapt his warm-but-wisecracking memory play to the more basic demands of service comedy. Being a former TV writer, for Phil Silvers as Sergeant Bilko, among others, Simon knows how to turn the jokes out. (return to text)
6. commercial comedies: Simon is so securely within this tradition that in his second volume of memoirs he shapes an incident involving a hooker-masseuse that happened to him like an episode of the rancid old Love, American Style TV show (Play 34-5). (return to text)
7. cut tons and tons: Illustrated Screenplay 10. (return to text)
8. The [Washington Post] review was so glowing: Play 245. (return to text)
9. revealing anecdote: Rewrites 318-9. (return to text)
10. I know I didn’t write : Play 124-5. (return to text)
11. Of her other movies only Rambling Rose gives you any idea of how good Coolidge’s direction is here. You certainly can’t say the same of her first feature Valley Girl from 1983, some people’s affection for which can be explained only by Nicolas Cage’s performance. Valley Girl has the same boy-girl dynamic as a beach party movie but even less atmosphere as a piece of directing. At times the dialogue has the just-reading-the-lines sound of the lead-in dialogue in a porno movie. (return to text)
12. We need more interesting people: Tolkin, Player 110. This assault has an intriguing Oedipal undertone, since Tolkin’s father Mel worked with Simon in his television days, and is among the group of Sid Caesar’s writers thanked by Simon in the dedication to his 1995 play Laughter on the 23rd Floor. (return to text)