Lost in Yonkers by Neil Simon

First published: 1991

First produced: 1991, at Stevens Center for the Performing Arts, Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Type of plot: Comedy; realism

Time of work: 1942

Locale: Grandma Kurnitz’s living and dining rooms, Yonkers, New York

Principal Characters:

• Grandma Kurnitz, , the harsh, elderly German matron of the Kurnitz family
• Bella, her thirty-five-year-old mentally ill daughter who lives at home
• Louie, Grandma Kurnitz’s gangster son
• Gert, Grandma Kurnitz’s daughter who has left home
• Eddie, Grandma Kurnitz’s son, and father of Jay and Arty
• Jay, a grandson, fifteen years old
• Arty, a grandson, thirteen years old

The Play

The play takes place in the sparsely furnished living and dining rooms of Grandma Kurnitz’s apartment above Kurnitz’s Kandy Store in Yonkers, New York. A small kitchen is off to one side. Doors lead to two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a staircase going directly down to the store. Jay and Arty are waiting in the living room while their father talks to Grandma Kurnitz in her bedroom. The boys heartily dislike and fear their authoritarian grandmother. Jay remarks that there is something peculiar about each of Grandma’s children. Their father, Eddie, trembles in fear of Grandma. Bella, their mentally ill aunt, is “a little . . . closed for repairs” upstairs. When Aunt Gert visits Grandma, she cannot finish a sentence without gasping for breath. Uncle Louie has become a bagman for gangsters.

Bella arrives in a state of confusion. She went to the movies but, unable to find the theater she was looking for, went to another one and wants the boys to go with her next week, if “I can find the wrong theater again.” Eddie comes out of the bedroom and explains to his sons that he went in debt to a loan shark to pay hospital and doctor bills for their mother when she was dying of cancer. He owes the loan shark nine thousand dollars. Until the outbreak of World War II opened up new jobs, Eddie had no hope of repaying him. Now he can earn that much money in a year, traveling through the South and West and selling scrap iron, but only if Grandma takes care of the boys while he is away. As much as they hate the idea, the boys agree to stay with her. Grandma, however, rejects Eddie’s request, telling him he is too weak and needs to grow up and solve his own problems. People, she says sternly, must be hard as steel to survive in the world. Grandma does not relent until Bella asserts herself by threatening to go away and leave her mother all alone if she does not take in the boys.

The passage of time is indicated by stage blackouts, during which the voice of Eddie is heard reading letters to his sons. In one scene, Aunt Bella confides to the boys that while at the movie theater she met an usher who wants to marry her. Although he is also mentally ill, the couple plans to open a restaurant if Grandma will loan them five thousand dollars. In another scene, Uncle Louie sneaks into the house carrying a black bag. He warns the boys not to touch it. When the boys mention that two men have been driving by looking for him, Louie bribes each boy with five dollars to say nothing if anyone calls asking about him. Act 1 ends with Eddie’s voice-over: “Dear Boys. . . . The one thing that keeps me going is knowing you’re with my family. Thank God you’re in good hands. Love, Pop.”

Act 2 opens with Arty in bed with a fever. Grandma cooks some horrible-tasting German mustard soup. After forcing him to eat it, she orders Arty out of bed. Uncle Louie tells him that as a child in Germany, Grandma suffered greatly and is convinced that children must be trained to endure a harsh world stoically. Badly injured during a political riot, when a horse fell and crushed her foot, Grandma has been in pain every day and needs to walk with a cane, yet she refuses to take even so much as an aspirin. When they were growing up, if Louie or his brother or sisters broke a dish or misbehaved in any way, they were locked in a closet for hours. When Grandma heard Gert talking in her sleep, Gert did not get supper for a week until she learned to sleep holding her breath. Now when Gert visits her mother, she gasps for air in the middle of every sentence.

After a dinner that Gert attends, Bella haltingly informs the family that she wants to marry her usher boyfriend and open a restaurant. When Louie finally understands that the usher is mentally ill, he asks if what her boyfriend really wants is her money. Bella insists that he wants more than her money. What could be more than money? Louie asks. “Me! He wants me! He wants to marry me!” she replies. Bella hopes to marry him and have his babies. She is certain they will live happier lives than she or her siblings. Bella pleads with her mother for help, but Grandma rises without a word, walks into her bedroom, and shuts the door behind her.

Bella leaves home for two days and returns crestfallen. In a powerful scene she tells her mother that she felt safe with her usher, knowing that because he was like her, he loved her and understood her. Although Louie gave her the five thousand dollars they needed from his black bag, her boyfriend was too timid to leave the protection of his parents, and Bella’s plans fell through. Now she and her mother must learn to deal with what has occurred.

Simon provides an upbeat ending. In the play’s closing scene, nine months have passed. Eddie has repaid his debts and returns to claim his children. Uncle Louie has enlisted in the army and is fighting the Japanese in the South Pacific. Bella informs her mother that she is going out with a new girlfriend; the girlfriend has a brother, and Bella will invite the two for dinner later in the week.

Dramatic Devices

Simon wrote a well-made Broadway play nearly every year. In this play he uses a straightforward chronological narrative structure. Each scene flows from the preceding one and directly advances the action. At the start of the play, the exchanges between Jay and Arty introduce all the characters and establish their roles. When Bella and her mother appear onstage, they live up to the audience’s expectations. Bella grows in emotional depth as the play develops, but Grandma does not deviate from the horrific figure the boys depicted. The personalities of Louie and Gert are similarly prefigured in the boys’ conversation that opens the play.

Scene changes are well managed. The stage darkens and Eddie’s voice is heard reading letters to his children. References to the cities he has visited help establish the passage of time as he travels across the South earning money. Hints of possible heart problems build suspense concerning his children’s eventual fate. At the end of the first act, Eddie’s voice-over provides an ironic contrast with the reality the audience has just observed.

Simon portrays Grandma’s character more through what she fails to do than by her direct actions. Never does she supply parental warmth or provide emotional support for her children. In the play’s most powerful scene she wastes not a syllable or breath refusing Bella’s cry for help. She ignores her daughter completely. Rising slowly, she turns and silently limps to her room, quietly closing the door behind her.

Although some critics faulted Simon for depending on one-line gags, in fact most laughs are built on previously introduced material and enhance the central themes of the play. Arty’s reference to Louie’s information that, although Grandma is in constant pain, she will not even take an aspirin, provides a surefire laugh when he tells his brother, “I’m afraid of her Jay. A horse fell on her when she was a kid and she hasn’t taken an aspirin yet.”

Critical Context

Simon is famous for writing light domestic comedies that became major box-office hits. Of twenty-six plays produced in the thirty years before Lost in Yonkers, all but five attracted large audiences and earned Simon a multimillion-dollar fortune. Critics, less enthusiastic than his faithful fans, questioned his lack of interest in formal experimentation and often dismissed him as too prolific, mechanically creating gag-laden comedies. Although touring companies performed his plays to packed houses across the United States, and his plays were successfully produced in Great Britain and many foreign countries, Simon complained that his reputation as a lightweight kept many regional theaters from performing his work.

Critical attitudes began to change with the appearance of the Brighton Beach trilogy. The themes of the plays seemed more significant than critics expected, especially the presentation of a parent-child conflict in Broadway Bound. Some critics were even willing to concede that many earlier plays, previously written off as lighthearted comedies, actually portrayed the deeper dynamics and difficulties of personal relationships.

Lost in Yonkers received even more praise than the trilogy, winning Simon a Tony Award for best play and a Drama Desk Award. Although Simon predicted that he would never win a Pulitzer Prize, Lost in Yonkers won the 1991 award for drama. Many critics termed it Simon’s best play—his least sentimental and most satisfying dark comedy, mining its humor out of very painful material. Not all reviews were completely positive, but most agreed that Simon had written an honest and compelling examination of family conflict, singling out the scenes between Bella and her mother for special praise. Some critics questioned the slow exposition of the family situation at the start of the play; others liked the plot up until its happy ending, calling it a forced and unconvincing conclusion for such a wrenching drama. Only Mimi Kramer in The New Yorker was wholly negative, finding nothing honest or authentic in the entire play. Despite Simon’s fears, regional and collegiate theater groups have added Lost in Yonkers to their repertoire.

Sources for Further Study

Konas, Gary, ed. Neil Simon: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1997.

Kramer, Mimi. “Ill Apportioned Parts.” The New Yorker 67 (March 11, 1991): 75-77.

Lipton, James. “Neil Simon.” In Playwrights at Work: Paris Review, edited by George Plimpton. New York: The Modern Library, 2000.

Richards, David. “The Last of the Red Hot Playwrights.” New York Times Magazine, February 17, 1991, 30-36, 57, 64.

Simon, Neil. The Play Goes On: A Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.