Word: brighton
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...Brighton Beach Memoirs...
NEIL Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs is a bittersweet comedy about a Jewish family, based loosely on Simon's own, living in Depression-era Brooklyn. It can be a very enjoyable and heart-wrenching play, but the current Mather House production doesn't live up to the script's potential...
...play stars Daniel O'Keefe as Eugene, the 15-year-old Simon surrogate whose writings at this age, we are led to believe, eventually become the play itself. Brighton hinges on Eugene, his thoughts and his interactions with other characters, and O'Keefe plays the pubescent Eugene admirably, lending believability to a role which requires that his paramount interest be seeing naked breasts. O'Keefe's beady-eyed facial expressions and air of child-like surprise throughout the show are what make the play worth seeing...
Because this play attempts to depict the essence of a very human family, though, every actor's portrayal is significant. And it is here that Brighton falls short. While Josh Frost does have his good moments as Eugene's brother Stanley, he usually looks like an actor acting. His gesticulations often seem forced and unnatural. Likewise, Robert Herzstein, who plays the boys' father Jack, often seems to be merely saying the lines without inhabiting his character. His demeanor as an authority figure is sometimes effective, but it often seems as though Herzstein himself is not convinced of his own portrayal...
...BRIGHTON Beach Memoirs is the first play in Neil Simon's trilogy of bittersweet autobiographical comedies with alliterative Bs in the titles. The play is about the early adolescence of a boy in an extended Jewish family in Depression-era Brooklyn...