Brighton Beach Memoirs

This play is regarded as Neil Simon’s “funniest, richest and consequently the most affecting of his plays.” Eugene is a young teen growing up in Brooklyn in 1937. Dreaming of baseball and girls, he must cope with the mundane existence of Brooklyn: a formidable mother, an overworked father, and 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.”