Brighton Beach Memoirs

Full Length, Comic Drama / 3m, 4f / Comb. Ints/Ext. Here is part one of Neil Simon's autobiographical trilogy: a portrait of the writer as a young teen in 1937 living with his family in a crowded, lower middle-class Brooklyn walk-up. Eugene Jerome, standing in for the author, is the narrator and central character. Dreaming of baseball and girls, Eugene must cope with the mundane existence of his family life in Brooklyn: formidable mother, overworked father, and his worldly older brother Stanley. Throw into the mix his widowed Aunt Blanche, her two young (but rapidly aging) daughters and Grandpa the Socialist and you have a recipe for hilarity, served up Simon-style. This bittersweet memoir evocatively captures the life of a struggling Jewish household where, as his father states "if you didn't have a problem, you wouldn't be living here." "Brings a fresh glow to Broadway...In many respects his funniest, richest and consequently the most affecting of his plays."-New York Daily News "Simultaneously poignant and funny. The characters are fully dimensional, believable... An outstanding show...the best seen on Broadway in too long a time."-Variety "Hilarious comedy...His finest play...A delightful and enriching experience."-CBS-TV

Length: 2 acts.

A revealing and heartfelt memoir of a Pulitzer Prize–winning artist finding joy and inspiration after tragedy. In his critically acclaimed Rewrites, Neil Simon talked about his beginnings—his early years of working in television, his first real love, his first play, his first brush with failure, and, most moving of all, his first great loss. Simon's same willingness to open his heart to the reader permeates The Play Goes On. This second act takes the reader from the mid-1970s to the present, a period in which Simon wrote some of his most popular and critically acclaimed plays, including the Brighton Beach trilogy and Lost in Yonkers, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Simon experienced enormous professional success during this time, but in his personal life he struggled to find that same sense of happiness and satisfaction. After the death of his first wife, he and his two young daughters left New York for Hollywood. There he remarried, and when that foundered he remarried again. Told with his characteristic humor and unflinching sense of irony, The Play Goes On is rich with stories of how Simon's art came to imitate his life. Simon's forty-plus plays make up a body of work that is a long-running memoir in its own right, yet here, in a deeper and more personal book than his first volume, Simon offers a revealing look at an artist in crisis but still able and willing to laugh at himself.

The second in Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Neil Simon's trilogy which began with Brighton Beach Memoirs and concluded with Broadway Bound. When we last met Eugene Jerome, he was coping with adolescence in 1930's Brooklyn. Here, he is a young army recruit during WW II, going through basic training and learning about Life and Love with a capital 'L' along with some harsher lessons, while stationed at boot camp in Biloxi, Mississippi in 1943.

“A virtuosic debut [and] a wry look at immigrant life in the global age.” —Vogue Having left Odessa for Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, with a sense of finality, the Nasmertov family has discovered that the divide between the old world and the new is not nearly as clear-cut as they had imagined. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, returning is just a matter of a plane ticket, and the Russian-owned shops in their adopted neighborhood stock even the most obscure comforts of home. Pursuing the American Dream once meant giving up everything, but does the dream still work if the past refuses to grow distant and mythical, remaining alarmingly within reach? If the Nasmertov parents can afford only to look forward, learning the rules of aspiration, the family’s youngest, Frida, can’t help looking back—and asking far too many questions. Yelena Akhtiorskaya’s exceptional debut has been hailed not only as the great novel of Brighton Beach but as a “breath of fresh air … [and] a testament to Akhtiorskaya’s wit, generosity, and immense talent as a young American author” (NPR).

Koprince (English, U. of North Dakota at Grand Forks) seeks to grant the prolific and popular playwright a measure of the serious literary attention that has passed his work by. She analyzes 16 of Simon's comedies beginning with his first Broadway effort, Blow your horn (1961) and ending with Laughter on the 23rd floor (1993). Koprince emphasizes Simon's versatility, craftsmanship, and willingness to experiment with the comedic form as well as the fundamentally serious nature of his plays. Small format: 5.25x7.25". Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A comedy - straight from Broadway.