 What do a Jewish working class family and a wealthy brood of Mayflower descendants have in common? You would think very little, yet in the hands of two iconic American masters the answer appears to be … everything. This season, TACT is delighted to announce its Mainstage season: Neil Simon’s 1991 Pulitzer Prize Winning Lost in Yonkers, and A.R. Gurney’s brilliant, yet often overlooked comedy/drama, Children. Focusing on the struggles which define familial discontent, both playwrights take us deep inside the workings of two seemingly different clans, whose poignant, often darkly funny fights for survival are at the heart of the action. For both Simon and Gurney, family togetherness means a precarious balancing act between filial loyalty, identity, and commitment, coupled with repression, jealousy, family skeletons, and all of those delicious dysfunctional dynamics that create compelling story telling – and great theatre.  Our Fall presentation, Children, was written in 1971 and produced in the United States in 1974. Gurney, who has long been a favorite of American audiences, struggled to get a U.S. production for this early ensemble piece loosely adapted from a John Cheever short story. When Children was first shopped, Gurney was told by one producer that its WASPy tenor was so insular that Jewish audiences would need headsets with translations piped in so that they could follow the story! Obviously, that proved not to be the case, for after a successful premiere in London, the play was produced by the Manhattan Theatre Club – sans headsets. The play centers on a matriarch’s desire to move on with her life, five years after the death of her husband, by giving her children their inheritance: the family vacation home. All she asks in return is that she be left in peace to marry the man she has loved for most of her adult life. Extricating herself from her needy brood, however, is easier said than done. As the family begins to split at the seams, she must make a decision between her kids and her freedom. Children examines that thin line between the pull of the tribe, and the road to self fulfillment. Simon’s Lost In Yonkers, which we're presenting in the Spring, is a culmination of all that he is best known for. When it opened on Broadway in February of 1991, critics excitedly recognized it as his most substantial play to date. Yonkers won the Tony Award for Best Play, Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play and The Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1991, and then proceeded to run for 780 performances over the course over the following two years.  Much like his Brighton Beach Trilogy, Simon’s Lost in Yonkers, feels deeply personal and wrought from life’s experiences. Yonkers, however, offers the playwright’s perspective from several character viewpoints; he is not just the boy at the bottom of the family totem pole, but the grandson, the son, and the father, who struggles to keep the family together after losing his wife to cancer. He is also seen in the powerful Jewish matriarch, Grandma Kurnitz, toiling to keep familial ideals alive and intact. Clearly, Neil Simon and A. R. Gurney are the designated chroniclers of their tribes, and their times. This odd couple, born within four years of one another, both have dedicated their careers to stories that resonate deeply with audiences. More importantly, they have continued to delight us for four decades with characters whom we can laugh with and relate to, as they struggle to understand their place in a world where the rules are constantly changing. Whether living in a cramped apartment in Yonkers, or a sprawling ancestral estate somewhere off the coast of New England, the examination of these two archetypal families underscores the universality of our most intricate needs – to embrace our roots, without losing ourselves, and take comfort in knowing that we are not alone in our quest for identity. |
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