Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #302941 in Books
• Published on: 1993-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780452268838
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Simon's 1991 Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning play about two young boys who are forced to live for a year with their domineering, ill-tempered grandmother while their father takes a job in another state is beautifully realized by the L.A. Theatre Works cast. Like most of Simon's works, this one features an eccentric cast of characters. Listeners meet Aunt Gert (played by Gia Carides), whose voice frequently switches into a wheeze midsentence, and Uncle Louie (played by Dan Castellaneta), a Bogart-like gangster. This production realizes Simon's trademark mix of comedy and drama: the one-liners are hilarious, but the characters' sad, dysfunctional relationships are poignant. The compassionate, three-dimensional performances, combined with Simon's nuanced writing and authentic rendering of 1940s speech, make the listener fully believe in these realistic, complex characters. Standout performers include Roxanne Hart as the boys' kindhearted but nervous Aunt Bella and Barbara Bain as Grandma Kurnitz, whose tough, coldhearted exterior is a reaction to a lifetime of devastating pain and loss. Also excellent are Ben Diskin and Kenneth Schmidt as the young boys. At first lonely and miserable, fearing and hating their stern grandmother, they gradually come to respect and understand her. Based on the Random House hardcover.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

YA-- An insightful drama about one woman's drive and its emotional toll on her and her family. Grandma Kurnitz has endured many crises, ranging from a harsh childhood in Germany to being a young widow with six children in a foreign country. From her life she learned to be strong, hard, and cold, and this is the lesson she tries to instill in her four remaining children. While her two teenage grandsons are in her care, the three learn the importance of being loved and loving, and the difference between living and surviving. The themes of family ties and the search for love should strike a responsive chord with many young adults.

Patricia A. Long, R.E. Lee High School, Springfield

Copyright 1992 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
Simon's nostalgic drama about a New York Jewish family in the 1940s could have been written for the ear. Each character speaks with a distinct cadence; even young brothers Jay (Ben Diskin) and Arty (Kenneth Schmidt) are immediately recognizable from their first lines. The play is melodramatic and relies too often on verbal tricks, such as Gert's (Gia Carides) wheezing, but the core struggle is powerful. Central to it are Barbara Bain, who plays the grandmother, trapped by old pain but longing to love and protect her children, and the childlike Bella (Roxanne Hart). The range and depth of these women make this production thrilling. G.T.B. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

Moving. Witty. Dramatic. Hopeful: Neil Simon at his best.
First and foremost, Neil Simon is a brilliant playright, and Lost in Yonkers is another feather in his cap. Set in Yonkers, New York in 1942 during the second world war, two children-Jay and Artie-must stay for one year (while a debt is being cleared by their father) with their cold-hearted, inflexible, emasculating and miserly Grandmother Kurnitz, a hardened survivor and also a woman whose own inner emotional "icing up" (because of her own uncommunicated tragedy) turned her own kids into a petty thug (Louie), a childlike simpleton (Bella), a castrated doormat (Eddie) and a stuttering fool whom many privately mock (Aunt Gert). And under the intense conditions that this one woman evokes, Jay and Artie must struggle to live or rather survive, for a house without love or any caliber of human warmth whatsoever can quickly change these two boys from innocence and humor to the very spitting image of their deeply flawed aunts and uncle, and they themselves realize this; they must be steely and unfeeling, as their grandmother would love to have happen, for anything opposite that would be a sign of weakness and failure. And that is what makes Lost in Yonkers sad, disturbing and frightening, because those very elements are the ingredients for a very dysfunctional adulthood, and that is sometimes the worst weapon of all--the lacking of human love and warmth. But with the strict, life-sucking obedience that the kids must adhere to in order for there to be some semblance of peace and cohesion, one would think that there would be no possible glimmer of hope at all. Yet, the hope comes in the form of Jay and Artie's childlike aunt, Bella, whose simplicity will simply not allow her to be an unfeeling android who goes through the motions of life. She yearns for love and demands it, if not from her very mother than from her nephews and those whom she tries to date and form relationships with: "...But I'll never stop wanting what I don't have...It's too late to go back for me...Maybe I'm still a child but now there's just enough woman in me to make me miserable. We have to learn to deal with that somehow, you and me...And it can never be the same anymore...(She gets up) I'll put my things away...I think we've both said enough for today...don't you?" (P. 114). Bella's audacity to finally stand up and against her mother's cold stranglehold shifts the whole play and all its characters-though Gert and Louie seem so far gone and too steeped in their own problems to be redeemed-to a higher realm of betterment and potential, specificially for Jay and Arty, who have quitely borne their misery with fear and sharp wit and one-liners, while Bella and Grandmother Kurnitz have also somehow emotionally improved, if only minutely. But the next generation has been spared the wrath. Lost in Yonkers is about fear in the family, the sufferings that family's can inflict upon one another and ultimately redemption through that suffering. Lost in Yonkers is a true American play.

"I stopped feeling because I couldn't stand the thought of losing again."
Set in Yonkers, New York, in 1942, this Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning play captures the tumult of the period by focusing on the lives of three generations of one family, all of whom are dealing with personal issues in addition to the traumas of World War II. Arty, age 13, and Jay, age 15, whose mother has just died of cancer, must move in with their stern immigrant grandmother and sweet, but ditzy, Aunt Bella while their father works for ten months in the South.

Grandma Kurnitz, who (ironically) runs a sweet shop, is embittered by her life: only four of her six children survive, and none of them are close to her. She does not know her grandchildren and does not want them living with her and messing up her life and her house, facts she makes plain to the boys from the outset. Ruling with an iron hand, she terrifies everyone around her.

The coming-of-age of Arty and Jay, as they learn to deal with Grandma and eventually learn to respect her, is not without its complications as the rest of the family involves the boys in their own issues. Aunt Bella, who is mentally and emotionally a child, falls in love. Aunt Gert, who can speak only as she exhales, and wheezes as she inhales (the result of a childhood trauma involving Grandma), checks in periodically on Grandma and Bella but tries to avoid Grandma. Uncle Louie is a bagman for the mob, and he is on the run. Their father, who maintains a dramatic presence through his letters, cannot come home until he has earned enough to pay off the loan sharks to whom he is indebted for the money for his wife's cancer treatments.

Moments of great drama, wit, and poignancy play out within the apartment, with all the action revolving around Grandma. Gradually, the reader/viewer develops empathy for this victim of life's tragedies, a woman who has made her own life more difficult than it needed to be and permanently damaged the lives of her family. The liveliness and optimism of Arty and Jay, as they try to survive Grandma and their life with her, cast the damaged lives of their elders into sharp relief, adding to the dramatic intensity of the climax. Firmly grounded in time, place, and atmosphere, this play, like many other Simon plays, provides a close-up look at a struggling family in New York and reveals its action from the point of view of a child who comes of age during the action. A beautiful evocation of man's universal need for love and respect. n Mary Whipple

The Good Doctor
Rewrites: A Memoir

Heartfelt
I was pleasantly surprised by Lost in Yonkers. The story touched my heart without being pretentious. Neil Simon is one of the best modern playwrights who has the heart of Miller and the inventiveness of Mamet.