BROADWAY BOUND
As a result, the laughs that Simon coaxes out of his characters are richer and more varied. There are the usual pithy, Jewish-inflected one-liners: “A heart attack God gives you. Nerves you get from people who worry about you”; “Jewish guys are never good at sports played between November and April.” But they are more deeply woven into the fabric of everyday human life that Simon so convincingly and affectingly presents.
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William Ragsdale, who played Eugene last season in the road show of Biloxi Blues, meets Shelley with a paradoxical mix of warmth and distance that perfectly fits this memory play; his errant father Jack is played superbly by David Margulies–the scene in which Jack admits his extramarital affair to Kate is every bit as upsetting as it should be–and the compulsively achieving older brother Stanley is played with fierce and funny intensity by Nathan Lane. Salem Ludwig, as Eugene’s aging socialist grandfather, and Bernice Massi, as Kate’s wealthily married sister, round out Simon’s wonder-filled vision of the family as the impermanent and eternal crucible of sustenance and shame, tears and laughter.
