LOST IN YONKERS
“The one place in the world you’re safe is with your family,” says a character in Neil Simon’s almost perfect comedy-drama Lost in Yonkers. But if the family–yours, or the institution–isn’t safe, what then? Like the best of Simon’s other work (The Odd Couple, the Brighton Beach trilogy), Lost in Yonkers is comedy driven by desperate fear that the security, affection, and sense of place we associate with family are in imminent danger of crumbling forever. The witty jokes that salt Simon’s script are laughter in the dark.
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By the time Bella and Eddie’s two other siblings–Louie, a small-time hood with a bagful of Jimmy Cagney imitations, and good-natured but weak-willed Gert–arrive on the scene, the plot is simmering. Poor Bella is infatuated with a mentally handicapped movie-theater usher but knows her mother would never approve of marriage; meanwhile Jay and Arty spend their nights searching for the hidden fortune that miserly, barbed-wire-hearted Grandma refuses to share with Eddie, hoping against hope that Grandma doesn’t know what they’re doing. Grandma knows. Grandma knows everything.
There are two exceptions: Jacqueline Williams’s apocalyptic fortune-teller is dynamic and passionate. So is the tormented, raging Henry of Isaiah Washington, whose assignment to the role demonstrates how politically correct “color-blind” casting has been replaced by unorthodox color-sensitive casting. Washington is black, while Richard Poe, who plays Mr. Antrobus, is white. Since Pat Bowie, playing Mrs. Antrobus, is black, the notion of a white father having a black son is feasible. The audience is invited not to ignore Washington’s race but to notice the new dimension it helps him bring to the role; the feud between Henry and his father takes on blistering new force, as Washington faces off with Poe in the play’s emotionally charged climax: “What have you got to lose?” sneers Henry, speaking to his father amid the debris of a long and ruinous war. “Tear everything down. . . . I’m not going to be a part of any peacetime of yours. . . . Being a good boy and a good sheep, like all the stinking ideas you get out of your books? Oh, no. I’ll make a world, and I’ll show you.” In this postconflagration confrontation, as nowhere else in the Goodman production, The Skin of Our Teeth reasserts itself as a flawed, idiosyncratic, but still potent American classic.
