Bonkers in Yonkers

Jonathan Fox was both surprised and moved when he saw Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers in its original Broadway run back in the early 1990s, back when he was still a grad student in New York. 

“I was familiar with his earlier plays like The Odd Couple and Barefoot in the Park, so I was expecting a lot of one-liners and jokes, and wasn’t prepared for having such a moving experience,” he said. “It was very different from his other plays, much more from the heart. It’s stayed with me all this time, and in re-reading it I still found it a fascinating, dramatic, engrossing yet funny look at these young boys and the family who face all these trials and tribulations.”

The boys in question are young Brooklyn teenagers who find themself lost in Yonkers when their father drops them off at his mother’s house in 1942. Dad needs to take a job on the road to pay off debt from his deceased wife’s cancer treatment. Grandma, a Jewish refugee from Germany, lives above her candy store but has nothing sweet to her personality, making the teenagers’ new situation a challenging one to adapt to. 

Fox is helming SBCC Theater Group’s production – which plays the Garvin Theatre from October 9-26. It is his first major directing job since departing Ensemble Theatre Company in the summer of 2023 after 17 years as ETC’s artistic director. He describes the production as containing plenty of Simon’s warmth and humor, which he explains is  necessary to alleviate some of the play’s arguable darkness. 

“We see this world through the eyes of the boys, who have a lot of wit,” he said. “It’s through them that we meet all the other relatives in the family. Their uncle is a gangster, their other aunt has a speech impediment, their father is in desperate straits and highly emotional, and their Aunt Bella has never left home. Bella is very much mentally and emotionally a child, but has a buoyancy and optimism towards life and is finally acknowledging her own sexual desires. The humor is vitally important because the play would be pretty bleak without it. But instead it’s quite heartwarming and affecting.”

Fox said that Simon actually wrote that – in his view – Bella is the lead role in the play, as she undergoes a great deal of change, an assessment with which actress Leesa Beck concurred. 

“She has one of the biggest arcs from the beginning to the end of the show,” Beck said. “At first, she is truly lost, stuck in a situation for her whole life that has kept her from being able to blossom and grow as a person. But this situation they face as a family shakes things loose and causes her to grow and find the path that she’s supposed to be on.”

Indeed, critics have said as much about Simon himself over the 30-plus years since the Pulitzer-and-Tony-winning Yonkers premiered. “There’s a depth of character, humanity and personal investment that place Lost in Yonkers among Simon’s more affecting works,” the New York Times wrote of the 2012 Broadway revival. “There’s still much to savor in his work.”