BROADWAY BOUND
Simon not only gives the memory a shape like a living statue, he also shows us Eugene’s amazement that his mother ever had a vibrant life apart from him. More important, Eugene is caught in the act of becoming a writer: this time around he doesn’t just hear Kate’s oft-told tale, he transforms it into an imaginary play by acting out potential audience reactions and punching home the reverie’s big moments.
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Broadway Bound, the third installment in Simon’s semiautobiographical trilogy, is in many ways the most revealing. Simon’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Gag Writer” depicts a young, contagiously hopeful Eugene and his eager-beaver brother, Stanley, embarking on careers as comedy writers at the very moment that their Brooklyn family is falling apart: their maternal grandparents have separated, their parents are soon to split, and at the end Eugene and Stanley–no longer stockroom and retail clerks but salaried serial writers for CBS Radio–leave home for Manhattan. (As in the earlier plays, Eugene acts as narrator; here it makes especially good sense, given the writer’s journey depicted in Broadway Bound.)
It’s the late 40s, and whether he knows it or not, young Eugene, a hardened veteran of family squabbles (Brighton Beach Memoirs) and World War II (Biloxi Blues), is slowly turning his life into art. With their mother’s blessing, Eugene and Stanley seek careers as comedy writers; the father just wants them to work hard, as he must in a job he loathes, and not complain.
When the Jeromes see themselves as the butt of jokes on national radio, especially when the father is described as a garment cutter who’s “into lady’s pajamas,” it’s no laugh a minute. Interpreting the crack as an accusation of adultery, Jack reviles the boys for disgracing the family by hanging out its dirty laundry. Stanley retorts that their father dirtied it himself. Or course both are right, which is just what makes it hurt.
As the father, Peter Maronge emotionally isolates this bitter, lonely man from the start; where almost everyone else reaches out, he’s resolutely pulling in. “There’s no place for me” is his sad conclusion. In contrast, Martin Bedoian as Stanley shows us all too well the price this needy, frustrated young man has paid trying to reach a father who can’t be there for him. In a sharply etched cameo, Patricia Van Oss conveys Aunt Blanche’s current crisis: she won’t feel guilty just because she’s rich.
The most cunning work is Harold Terchin’s foxy performance as the sardonic, all-too-literal grandfather, a man who can tell a joke without getting it. No doubt this boilerplated curmudgeon will be the hardest audience Eugene ever plays to–the best discipline possible for a future king of Broadway.
