BRIGHTON BEACH MEMOIRS
A comedy by Neil Simon
Directed by Marla O'Brien
 
Part one of Neil Simon's autobiographical trilogy, this is a portrait of the writer as a young teen in 1937 living with his family in a crowded, lower middle-class Brooklyn walk-up. Dreaming of baseball and girls, Eugene Jerome 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 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."