Raw Vulnerability Is Highlight Of ‘Lost In Yonkers’

Can a heartrending performance let you ignore the meandering script that “Lost in Yonkers” actually is?

Rebecca Edana shows us how in Hampton Theatre Company’s production of the play in Quogue. As Bella, the spinster daughter whose childlike innocence is packed in a womanly body, she lifts Neil Simon’s dramedy from hodgepodge into poignant, rousing theater. Her artless naivety and tender vulnerability grabs the stage every moment she’s on it, and Ms. Edana is on it most of the two-plus hours the play runs. She is the show’s lodestar as well as the unquestionable star of the evening.

But I know, criticizing the much awarded play from someone who’s written more than two dozen modern comedies—“Lost in Yonkers” was his 27th work for Broadway—amounts to heresy.

Yet there were so many tedious scenes that go on way too long foretelling every bit of plot twist so that everyone in the audience knows what’s coming next before the characters do. Where’s the surprise?

Mr. Simon wrote a string of hits known to most theater and movie goers: “Barefoot in the Park,” “The Odd Couple” and “Plaza Suite” among them. “Lost in Yonkers” is even considered his best-received work, and that’s why it was heaped with a Pulitzer, a Tony and a Drama Desk award.

Knowing all that, I couldn’t help feel that 1991—when “Lost in Yonkers” opened on Broadway—was the year that the critics decided to award Mr. Simon for his whole oeuvre the way the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Oscars is given to someone who’s worthy but has been overlooked year after year when the acting awards are handed out. Many expected John Guare’s more critically lauded “Six Degrees of Separation” to snatch the Pulitzer in ’91.

However, the critics who count—those from The New York Times to be precise—were not enamored, and in fact, after their main theater reviewer, Frank Rich, eviscerated the play, a second was sent less than two weeks later. Since this is almost unheard of, I could imagine the explosive phone calls with vivid language that led to this repeat review. However, the second stringer didn’t like the play much more. Yet it ran for about two years on Broadway, and was adapted into a movie with some of the same actors.

“Lost in Yonkers,” set in 1942, centers on a bitter, elderly widow who runs her household above her sweet shop and soda fountain with an iron fist. As someone who escaped the Holocaust—but not without getting a crushed foot from a horse at a Nazi demonstration—Grandma has hardened herself into the archetype of the Bitch Matriarch. Her rapping cane is a constant reminder of her pain, and the misery she inflicts on everyone in her sightline.

Two young teenage boys, Grandma’s grandchildren, are unhappily deposited for most of a year at her house of gloom while their father goes on the road to make enough money to pay off his late wife’s hospital bills. Their dad, Eddie (Russell Weisenbacher)—a weeper or a sweater, we’re not sure which—is the least damaged of Grandma’s four children who made it to adulthood. The two who died along the way, as well as her husband, add a tad of sympathetic resonance to Grandma’s edict that no one should shed tears. Ever.

One of the Hampton Theatre Company’s mainstays, Diana Marbury radiates Grandma’s nasty revenge for her lot—one can’t even call it tough love because where’s the love? Arty, the youngest son at 13-and-a-half, remarks you could cut off Grandma’s braids and sell them for barbed wire. Grandma is generally seated sideways here, and unfortunately it was impossible to see her facial expressions.

Bella’s mental development stopped somewhere in adolescence and that has kept her at home with her loveless mother. Thus she is thrilled when the wise-cracking boys come to stay—at last, someone to talk to who isn’t Grandma! While both boys are on stage nearly the entire production—and the teen actors Jamie Baio and Christopher Darrin are well enough played—their characters are not so much a part of the action but wry observers as they anxiously wait to be rescued.

Bella’s mental deficit may be the result of birth, childhood illness—or being thwacked on the head by Grandma’s cane. Another son, Louie (Edward Kassar), is perhaps Grandma’s proudest achievement because he came through her stern upbringing and emerged as a tough guy—but in the process he made a left turn, disappointing her as he became a gangster.

Daughter Gert (Catherine Maloney) appears in the last scene and her only role is to be yet another example of collateral damage of Grandma’s mothering—if it could be called that—with a speech impediment that becomes a running gag, which by then seems wildly inappropriate.

These are severely damaged people just trying to make the best of their lives, and the laughs—even though infrequent—feel like stuffing to fill out the action because Grandma’s so relentlessly grim and nearly every plot point has been foreshadowed.

This is not the fault of director George A. Loizides; it’s in the writing. When Bella reveals the single surprising twist, it has the gimmicky feel of a playwright in search of a dramatic turning point.

While Louie and the boys provide side stories, the real action is leading to the obvious blowup between Bella and Grandma. In a bravura turn, Ms. Edana’s willful child-woman confronts her battle-axe of a mother and the bombs go off. Lines such as “Maybe I am still a child but there is enough woman in me to be miserable” and “I have to love somebody who loves me back” zero in on the chilling existence she has lived to date with her mother. Grandma might change, but never enough.

Costume designer Teresa Lebrun visually marks Bella’s development with her frequent costume change of period dresses, and the last one—all brightness and light in yellow and red—signifies her transformation. Set designer Peter-Tolin Baker’s called on several shades of brown in the single set of the apartment to convey the gloomy, but orderly, existence of its inhabitants.

The central problem of “Lost in Yonkers” is that Mr. Simon never decides whether he is going for the jugular and real dramatic intent a la Tennessee Williams, or simply reaching for the laughs he writes so well. In combining both, the play itself falls short. Yet Ms. Edana’s fiery anguish as she breaks away from her old, scared silly self makes us aware of how deeply a mother can wound. The cast got a standing ovation at the performance I attended. Everyone’s good, but Ms. Edana stands above them all.

“Lost in Yonkers” will run through April 17 at Quogue Community Hall, 125 Jessup Avenue, Quogue. Showtimes are Thursdays and Fridays at 7 p.m., Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $30 for adults, $25 for seniors (excluding Saturdays) and $10 for students under 21. Call 866-811-4111 or visit hamptontheatre.org.