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All the Drama: “Lost in Yonkers”, 1991 Winner, Pulitzer Prize for Drama
00:34:20
All The Drama is hosted by Jan Simpson. It is a series of deep dives into the plays that have won The Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The Pulitzer Prize for Drama: “Lost in Yonkers“1991 Pulitzer winner “Lost in Yonkers”,
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Narrator
When the Moore family ditched cable Internet and switched to Zigly Fiber, they got so much more. Mr. Moore got more upload speed for next level gaming and livestreaming to the masses with reliable service. Mrs. Moore is no longer her family's IT guru, leaving her more time to stream games into overtime.
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Manny Azenberg
Let's go.
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Narrator
And young Mason Moore got more done quickly uploading HD product demos and video conferencing without FreeSync.
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Manny Azenberg
The numbers look good, Brad. You're on mute.
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Narrator
Switch from cable Internet to ziply fiber and get more of what you love for $65 less per month than cable@ziplyfiber.com.
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Jan Simpson
The year is 1991 and Americans are feeling on top of the world as the Cold War ends, with growing numbers of Eastern bloc countries adopting free market systems and the Soviet Union completely dissolving. The US flexes its muscles in other parts of the world too, getting 34 countries to join in a military action against Iraq in response to that country's attempt to annex its neighbor Kuwait. Meanwhile, the economy back home is roaring along with the dow hitting above 3,000 for the first time ever. But some of the country's old woes still surface, particularly when an amateur video captures four LA police officers severely beating a black motorist named Rodney King. And in that year of 1991, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama ignored all of that and went to Neil Simon's Lost in Yonkers, a poignant exploration of the ways in which financial hardship and emotional trauma and devastate one American family across several generations. My name is Jan Simpson. Welcome to all the Drama, a podcast about the plays and musicals that have won American theater's highest accolade, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. By the time he won the Pulitzer, Neil Simon had been the most famous playwright in America for nearly 33 decades. His shows, nearly all of them comedies and many of them inspired by his own life, were almost a genre of their own and audiences couldn't seem to get enough of them. At one point, Simon had four shows running on Broadway. At the same time. Almost half of the 30 something plays he wrote were turned into movies and TV shows, including the long running series the Odd Couple. And he was frequently called in as a show doctor to help fix shows written by other people. That's the reason some people thought he'd acquired the nickname Doc. But he actually got that nickname when he was a kid and became obsessed with a toy doctor's kit he got as a gift. The other gift he got, this one God given, was the ability to transform A difficult situation into a comedic one, turning pain into laughter. And there were lots of difficult and painful times during his earliest years. Simon was born in the Bronx on July 4, 1927, as Marvin Neil Simon. His father, Irving, was a moderately successful salesman in the garment business, but he frequently abandoned the family for months at a time. In his memoir, Simon estimates that Irving left at least 10 times during those long absences. Simon's mother, Mamie, took in boarders so that she could pay the rent and feed Simon and his brother Danny, who was eight years older. When things got really tough, she sometimes had to send the boys to stay with relatives. Life wasn't much easier when Irving was home either, because he and Mimi argued constantly. Young Neil found refuge in the neighborhood movie houses where he spent hours watching comedies. By the time he got to high school, he knew he wanted to write them himself and he spent hours in the library reading books by and about such comic masters as Mark Twain, Robert Benchley, and his all time favorite, George S. Kaufman. Simon's big brother Danny told him he was naturally funny and by the time Neil was 15, the brothers had begun writing together and selling their work. Their career was put on hold when Neil served in the Army Air Force Reserve, but it picked right back up when he got out and soon Danny and Doc Simon, as they build themselves, were writing scripts for radio and eventually TV shows, most famously for Sid Caesar's your Show of shows where the other members in the writing room included Carl Reiner, Larry Gilbart, Selma Diamond, Mel Brooks and and Woody Allen. The money was good, but Simon knew that he wanted to write plays and that he wanted to establish a career separate from his brother. He worked on his first play for three years and he later said he did more than 20 complete rewrites on it. The result was Come Blow your Horn, a comedy about two brothers sharing an apartment and dating as the restrictive 50s moved into the swinging 60s. It opened in 1961, ran for 678 performances, and launched Simon as a playwright. But his real breakout came in 1963 with barefoot in the Park, a romantic comedy directed by Mike Nichols and starring Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley as young newlyweds settling into their first apartment and their life with one another. It ran for 1563 performances. It was followed in 1965 by the Odd Couple, a kind of older version of Can Blow youw Horn, but this time with two divorce guys sharing an apartment. It ran for 964 performances and earned Simon his first Tony in the now retired category of Best author, best play that year went to Frank Gilroy's the Subject Was Roses, which also won that year's Pulitzer and was the subject of an earlier all the drama episode. By 1966, Simon was earning royalties of around $1 million a year, which would be nearly $10 million today. But although Simon was a commercial success and celebrated by his peers, it bothered him that critics were mixed about his work, which they called lightweight. In an attempt to show that he could tackle serious subjects, Simon wrote the Gingerbread lady, about an alcoholic actress. But despite a Tony winning performance by Maureen Stapleton, it ran for just 193 performances, a comparatively short run for a Neil Simon play. Simon quickly returned to form with The Prisoner of Second Avenue which ran for 798 performances, and The Sunshine Boys, which ran for 538. Then in 1973, his wife Joan died from cancer. Within six months Simon met and married the actress Marsha Mason, but that marriage lasted just five years. It was then, trying to figure out why he was so unhappy despite all his career success that Simon looked back at his childhood and wrote Brighton Beach Memoirs, a fictionalized version of the struggles his family experienced in the period leading up to World War II. Although largely filtered through a comic lens, it ran 1,299 performances and provided a breakout role for a young actor named Matthew Broderick, who starred as the Simon stand in called Eugene Jerome. Brighton beach was such a huge hit that Simon followed it up two years later with a kind of sequel called Biloxi Blues about Eugene's time in the army and the year after that with Broadway Bound, the bittersweet story of Eugene and his older brother Stanley's attempts to break into show business at the same time that their parents marriage is collapsing. It ran for 756 performances and was named a finalist for the Pulitzer, although the prize that year went to August Wilson for Fences. And yes, its story is told in another episode of all the drama. Finally, in 1991, Simon wrote Lost in Yonkers. It was originally inspired by his memories of an uncle who had worked as an accountant for a garment firm with connections to the mob and Simon called it Louis the Gangster. But as he worked on the play, the uncle character drifted into a supporting role and the story began to center on two boys once again a Danny and Doc combo who have to move in with relatives they barely know after their mother dies and their father has to travel for work to pay off the money he borrowed to cover his wife's medical bills. The relatives who live above a family owned candy store in the Yonkers of the eventual title include the boy's grandmother, a tough and emotionally withholding woman who has so damaged her own children that the boy's father is a weakling, their Uncle Louie is a petty crook and their Aunt Bella is a childlike woman who at the age of 38 still lives at home with her widowed mother, but yearns for love and a family of her own. The play combined comedy and drama and finding actors who could handle both was crucial. Simon had seen the actor Kevin Spacey play the dissolute Jamie Tyrone in the 1986 revival of a Long Day's Journey into Night, the subject of yes, yet another all the drama episode, and Simon said that Spacey was his first and only choice to play Louis. Auditions were scheduled for the role of Aunt Bella and the first actress to read for the part was Mercedes Ruhl, who had been making a name for herself in off Broadway productions. As Simon recalled in his memoir, her reading brought him to tears and although he went ahead and saw other actresses for the part, he knew right then it was going to be hers. Casting the grandmother was particularly tricky. The role needed someone who could be convincingly intimidating without completely alienating the audience. Simon, his director Gene Sachs and producer Manny Azenberg agreed on the person they thought could handle that, and they traveled to England to persuade Irene Worth, the American born actress who had become a leading member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, to take the role. Lost in Yonkers opened at the Richard Rogers Theater on February 21, 1991, where it ran for 780 performances. Rule, Spacey and Worth all won Tonys for their performances. The play won a Tony too. But what meant the most to Simon was the news that it had won the Pulitzer Prize. It must have been particularly sweet for him that the competition that year was so strong. August Wilson's the Piano Lesson, Wendy Wasserstein's the Sisters, Rosenzweig, Aaron Sorkin's A Few Good Men, Craig Lucas Prelude to a Kiss, and Frank Galati's adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel the Grapes of Wrath. Still, the chair of that year's Pulitzer jury noted that Lost in Yonkers was the only play to show up on the individual list of all five jury members and that they all thought it to be, quote, a mature work by an enduring and often undervalued American playwright, end quote. A film version of the play came out in 1993 with Richard Dreyfus replacing Spacey as Uncle Louie, but it didn't do well, costing $15 million to make, it brought in only $9 million at the box office and picked up zero Oscar nominations. Simon continued to write, but he never had another hit after Lost in Yonkers. That was partly because his powers began to weaken as he developed Alzheimer's, but it was also because taste had begun to change and his style of writing fell out of favor. Even revivals of his old hits failed to sell. The 2000 revival of the Odd Couple, with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick still hot from their turns in the Producers, lasted barely a year. The next year, a revival of Barefoot in the park, with Amanda Peet and Patrick Wilson as the newlyw, managed just 109 performances. There was a lot of excitement in 2009 about a plan to run Brighton Beach Memoirs and Broadway Bound in repertory, but the advanced sales turned out to be so poor that Brighton beach closed after just nine performances and Broadway Bound never opened at all. I was lucky enough to see one of the performances of Brighton Beach Memoirs and I found the production, which was directed by David Cromer and featured a cast that included Noah Robbins as Eugene, Santino Fontana as his brother Stanley, and Laurie Metcalfe and Dennis Boutsakaris as their parents, to be terribly moving and I wish more people had been able to see it. Neil Simon died on August 26, 2018 from kidney failure and complications from Alzheimer's. In 2022, his old muse Matthew Broderick and Broderick's wife Sarah Jessica Parker used their combined star power to bring Simon's 1968 play Plaza Suite back to Broadway and despite mixed reviews, to get it through 110 mainly sold out performances. But although today's Broadway may be cool towards Simon, his plays still get done all over the country all the time. I set up a Google alert when I'm researching a play for these episodes and I've never gotten as many pings as I have for Simon plays. A production of Lost in Yonkers is actually scheduled for this month at the latte Theater in LaGrange, Illinois. I wasn't sure who I might be able to talk to for this episode, and so you can imagine how thrilled and honored I am that Simon's longtime producer and good friend Manny Azenberg agreed to talk with me about this high point of Neil Simon's still unrivaled career. Hello Manny Azenberg, welcome to all the drama.
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Manny Azenberg
It's my pleasure.
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Jan Simpson
Do you remember how you got the news that Lost in Yonkers had won the Pulitzer Prize?
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Manny Azenberg
I don't Remember the moment. But we knew it was a candidate, and we knew Neil Simon wanted it. It's something that he had not achieved with all his success. And we knew that either Brighton beach or Broadway Bound was up and didn't get it. And he was thrilled. It was more important to him than winning any of the other awards, the Tony or the drama critics or stuff like that.
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Jan Simpson
Why was it so important to him? He was so successful and so acclaimed.
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Manny Azenberg
Because the Pulitzer has a cache of being more sophisticated than the Tony. I don't have the same regard, frankly, but he did. The Pulitzer had more cachet, and it's more literary. And Neil was always criticized for not being literary, being successful, being funny, but not being Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams.
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Jan Simpson
Why do you think the jury chose this play, as you say? They didn't give it to Brighton beach or Broadway Bound.
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Manny Azenberg
Maybe one. It was very good. And it was also an unexpected play from Neil. The character of Bella is not a conventional Neil Simon character. And maybe it was about time. Lawson Yonkers was a very moving play about something that in its own way, was much more contemporary, about a woman who wanted a child, a woman who is somewhat diminished, somewhat damaged. It also had Irene Worth in the lead, which gave it a literary credibility.
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Jan Simpson
Were you surprised when you got the play from him that he'd written this particular play?
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Manny Azenberg
Not really, because the. The original title of that play was Louie the Gangster, and it was about these two kids their grandmother is asked to harbor. And Neil recalls somebody who was not a gangster in the terms of Al Capone, but like a bookmaker or somebody who was illegal. And that was the initial impetus for that play was Louis the Gangster, where the character of Bella came from. That's why he was talented, because none of us knew. And he latched on to. To this woman in that last scene when she says, I want a child, and I will love that child. Well, it's a heartbreak.
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Jan Simpson
Yeah. Yeah. I wonder, you were saying that this was such an important honor for him. Did people begin to expect too much from him in terms of doing just one more commercial hit? One more commercial hit? Did he feel the pressure of that?
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Manny Azenberg
Yes. Every play that he wrote was serious for him. He was not a frivolous person, and he was never on personally, you know, performing funny. I think you have to give him credit, Neil Simon and maybe Lucy and Desi for actually creating situation comedy.
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Jan Simpson
Yes.
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Manny Azenberg
And the original critics, which was Atkinson and Walter Kerr and Richard Watts, he was cheered by those early critics. And then later on, somewhere in the late 70s, early 80s, there were different critics. They said, yes, he can write funny plays, but can he write a serious play? So that's when, you know, he tried with Gingerbread Lady. And my personal opinion is that Brighton beach, the combination of Brighton beach and Broadway Bound, are as good a play about that period as Awakened Sing.
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Jan Simpson
Well, I was thinking about that and I was going to ask you about your thoughts about the closing of the dual repertory of Brighton beach and Broadway bound back in 2009.
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Manny Azenberg
We never got to it because as good as Brighton beach was, and it was a fresh rate production, I thought the Neil Simon public was no longer here.
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Jan Simpson
What do you mean by the Neil Simon audience is no longer here?
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Manny Azenberg
I think Neil began being successful, let's say in 1960, and it was a remarkable success. There's something like 22 successful plays, 17 out and out hits.
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Jan Simpson
It's amazing.
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Manny Azenberg
And 22 plays that had at least marginal success. And there was an audience and an enormous audience because every time we'd announce a play, there would be a big advance, sight unseen. And then the people that may have been 30 years old or 40 years old were now 70 years old and there was a new generation. And the Brighton beach that was done then was as good as anyone we ever did. And nobody showed up. It may take another 20 years and then there'll be an audience for it. I think Brighton beach and Broadway Bound will have a life.
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Jan Simpson
I saw that Brighton Beach Memoirs and I thought it was lovely production.
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Manny Azenberg
Yep. But. But there was no audience and the original ran three and a quarter years on Broadway, which has made it like the 10th longest, 11th longest running play.
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Jan Simpson
Was he hurt by that in 2009?
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Manny Azenberg
I think so, but by then, frankly, that was the beginning of Alzheimer's.
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Jan Simpson
Ah.
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Manny Azenberg
And so we weren't quite sure what he saw and what he didn't see. That was a bad period.
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Jan Simpson
Do you have a personal favorite among his many, many plays?
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Manny Azenberg
The one that we had the best time doing was Brighton Beach.
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Jan Simpson
Why? So what was it about that one?
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Manny Azenberg
The audience loved it. And it was the beginning of Matthew, you know, Matthew Broderick. And it was just huggable. In addition, it wasn't a New York play. It was successful everywhere. Everywhere that that play, play that people cheered. It was recognizable, a family struggle. And it was moving. You know, there's a lot of serious things that take place in that play. The growing up of the boys. Stanley runs away, Aunt Blanche is alone. The father has two jobs. The Jewish family is still in, in Poland. And they get out. There's a lot of seriousness in a major league funny play. So there's a lot of organic humor.
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Jan Simpson
And was it also that it was so close to his own life that I don't know.
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Manny Azenberg
But Brighton Beach, Broadway Bound, Biloxi, and Lost. The Yonkers always has two young men, and that's Neil and Danny. He's very much at home with those two characters.
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Jan Simpson
Mm. Was Lost in Yonkers the last of the plays that you think worked well? I mean, there were others that came after.
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Manny Azenberg
Yes, well, Lost in Yonkers was the. The. The last of the major successes. The Dinner Party was marginally successful. It wasn't as nearly as good.
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Jan Simpson
And was that because of the audience or in part because of his own decline?
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Manny Azenberg
It probably all of. All of the above. I don't know where the talent comes from with any of the playwrights. And maybe Neil just ran out of it. But by. By 2009, when we did the revival, what was the date on Dinner Party? Do you have that?
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Jan Simpson
Yeah, dinner party was 2000.
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Manny Azenberg
Well, that would mean that Neil had had successes for almost 40 years. That's a lot of currency.
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Jan Simpson
Yeah. I don't think anyone else has had that many success.
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Manny Azenberg
No, no. If you think of o' Neill or Williams or Miller or Inch, they're in a. In a 15, 20 year period. So Neil remained publicly successful for 30, 35 years. From come blow your horn to Lost in Yonkers has to be 35 years. Right. And not all of them were successful. But when they thought he was finished, along came Brighton Beach.
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Jan Simpson
So why is it his name is not remembered in the same way as some of those other playwrights you've mentioned?
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Manny Azenberg
It were ever thus because he wrote comedies and because he wasn't literary. My answer, when those observations come up, I said, has anybody replaced him? Who's writing the comedy? How do we define comedy now on stage? Who's written something that made people laugh? So he was of his time. And I suspect if you wait a while, Brighton beach or Broadway Bound or Yonkers will be done again. When the contemporary world changes, there's still any number of critics who were around when Neil was successful and there was petty envy for his success. How can a serious critic who really wanted to be a playwright deal with the fact that an unliterary guy has 17 smash hits?
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Jan Simpson
Well, I think, you know, maybe he was right in the sense that the Pulitzer was important to his memory, his legacy, because they can't take that away from him.
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Manny Azenberg
Yes. And it was an acknowledgement, finally. And you know, somebody wrote that comedy is harder. Making people laugh is harder than the serious play. And comedy is also, I think, of its time. We don't watch the Three Stooges and laugh anymore. And young people don't know anything about Charlie Chaplin. It's generational. The great dramas transcend time. The comedies don't.
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Jan Simpson
Except in. In those three plays that we keep coming back to. Brighton Beach, Broadway bound, and of course, Lost in Yonkers. He found a way to combine both.
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Manny Azenberg
I totally agree. And I think at some point it will. It will be accepted and recognized. Look at who was in all those fights. Start with come blow your horn and go all the way through to the end, and you'll see the lineup from Christopher Plummer to Jason Alexander to Matthew Broderick to Walter Massau. It's a pretty classy group, actually. George Scott, Maureen Stapleton can't get much better than that. Right. And if you think about the work he provided for an industry, for actors, for stage managers, for ticket takers. Remember, his plays ran. So if you got a job in a Neil Simon play, you might actually have a salary for a year or two. So I think Neil Simon provided more work for anybody in the history of the. Of Broadway other than, and maybe even more than Rodgers and Hammerstein. Lost in Yonkers also had a tour, and the two young producers, young, young men came into the office and wanted the touring rights for Lost and Yonkers, and their names were Kevin McCollum and Jeffrey Seller.
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Jan Simpson
Wow.
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Manny Azenberg
And that was the beginning of their career on the bus and truck of Lost in yonkers, starring Mercedes McCambridge, which finally closed in Anchorage, Alaska. And Jeffrey Seller will tell you that he made 800 a week, which was more money than he ever saw, except today with.
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Jan Simpson
With his royalties from Hamilton. Yes.
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Manny Azenberg
So if you. If you think about the totality of it and, and the fact that those plays were done internationally, if you go to Paris, prisoner of Second Avenue is being done every 20 minutes called Le Grandstanding. I don't know why. So his contribution continues.
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Jan Simpson
Well, he does have his place. The Pulitzer helped to make sure that he's not forgotten. And I want to thank you for just taking this time to remember him.
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Manny Azenberg
It's a pleasure. And any man who spent a life as a playwright, and he loved writing. His personal life was screwed up, but he loved writing, literally writing. He had a pad and a certain kind of pencil, and they were all. All the plays were handwritten, not typed. So that's a little bit of theater history.
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Jan Simpson
Well, thank you again for for sharing it with us.
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Manny Azenberg
So pleasure.
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Jan Simpson
And thank you for listening. I hope you'll come back next time and if you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please send them to me@janettaloidradio.com.
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Narrator
When the Moore family dished cable Internet and switched to Zigly Fiber, they got so much more. Mr. Moore got more upload speed for next level gaming and live streaming to the masses. With reliable service, Mrs. Moore is no longer her family's IT guru, leaving her more time to stream games into overtime.
- [35:05]
Manny Azenberg
Let's go.
- [35:06]
Narrator
And young Mason Moore got more done quickly uploading HD product demos and video conferencing without freezing the numbers look good.
- [35:13]
Manny Azenberg
Brad, you're on mute.
- [35:14]
Narrator
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Jan Simpson
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Jan Simpson
Wait.
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