In the 1984 edition of The Crown Guide to the World’s Greatest Plays from Ancient Greece to Modern Times, William Shakespeare merits specific sections on more than thirty of his thirty-six canonical plays including—surprisingly—The Winter’s Tale. By contrast, Neil Simon is represented just twice: his third and twentieth plays: Barefoot in the Park and Brighton Beach Memoirs. By the time the latter premiered on Broadway, Simon was already the most commercially successfully playwright in American history. While Neil Simon is most assuredly no William Shakespeare, there is something more than a little off in warranting The Winter’s Tale as much space (actually a little more) than Brighton Beach Memoirs. By any standard of measurement, Simon wins this round over Shakespeare if not necessarily by a knockout. (Lest anyone doubt this, simply try reading being around to actually attend one of the two or three productions of The Winter’s Tale that pop up every century or so.)
To observe that Neil Simon remains the most commercially successful American playwright even to this day is not to suggest that at the time the wistfully comic story of the Jerome family of Brooklyn, circa 1937 appeared that he was also a critic’s darling. Far from it: while recognized by his detractors as a joke machine, he was dismissed as lightweight. His plays were funny, occasionally offered acute insight in the foibles of everyday people and could make an audience swing from laughter to sentimentality at will, but he was never going to be compared to Shakespeare.
Brighton Beach Memoirs did not change that. At least not for most. Sure, Simon’s career took a sharp toward greater respectability following Brighton Beach—capped off with a Pulitzer Prize for Drama less than a decade later for Lost in Yonkers—but many still seem to miss the true genius which the playwright suddenly exhibited in this play.
It is natural for audiences of a certain generation to stumbled upon this play and immediately think of a movie and a TV series: A Christmas Story and The Wonder Years. Why? The present of both take place in the past with a voiceover narration provided by an adult version of the child at the center of the story. (For the record, Simon beat both of them to the punch.) While Simon’s play may seem to fit rather casually into that same narrative structure it is actually quite significantly different. Not just different, but incredibly more complex. The dual narrative structure represented by all three works of entertainment is nothing new nor do any of the three—including Simon’s play—represent revolutionary approaches. Still, the utilization of it by Simon in this play sets the stage for what would eventually become a trilogy of plays following Eugene Jerome from childhood to a hitch in the military and finally to Broadway to live out those childhood dreams of becoming a writer.
The choice to have the adult Ralphie Parker or the adult Kevin Arnold commenting from the future upon the events of the past which are set in the present of the audience has the effect of distancing the grown-up from the child. The narration in these cases is infused with the wisdom, knowledge, and seasoning of the passing years in a way that is immediate and tangible. What Simon chooses to do by having Eugene Jerome directly address the audience from the stage—not as a voice-over by an adult or even as a voice-over by the young actor playing the part—is far different. Essentially, the consequence is that Eugene is an active part of the past and the future within the present of the performance. When Eugene at one point turns to the audience and directly addresses them by observing:
“If my mother taught logic in high school, this would be some weird country”
it is clear that that he is speaking from the future, as an adult whose sense of ironic humor has been sharpened through experience but coming from the mouth of young Eugene instead of through the narration of adult Eugene, that sharp wit is endowed within the 15-year-old boy. Try to imagine A Christmas Story without Jean Shephard’s voice supplying the narration and instead those observations being spoken directly to the camera by the young actor playing Ralphie. It would be a pretty weird and ultimately oddly disconcerting juxtaposition. When young Eugene speaks with the authority gained by time and experience, however, it is not jarring. In fact, it seems perfectly normal. In fact, it seems to have more in common with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and certainly not because Matthew Broderick originated both roles; after all, how many people who have watched Ferris on his day off were in the audience when Broderick was playing young Eugene Jerome? But there is also a huge difference there as well; the direct address to the camera offered by Ferris Bueller does not come from the distant future. Exactly how far in the future his remembrance of the day’s event is supposed to have taken place is never made clear, but it certainly is not decades off as is the case here.
Brighton Beach Memoirs is a far, far better play than Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale not least because, well, even Shakespeare dropped a bomb now and then. Beyond that, however, Brighton Beach Memoirs is not just superior to the Bard’s truly abominable play, but also his own Pulitzer Prize winner. The sophisticated structure of narrative at work in the play may not be unique, but it certain represents a significant leap forward in what Simon wanted to do on the stage after so many successes with joke factories of the past. By exploring that perspective over the course of two more plays—collectively referred to as the “Eugene Trilogy”—was able to deepen the complexity of his story, broaden the thematic canvas he wanted to explore, unify a coming-of-age story about not just a single character but an entire country and put a distinct stamp on the entire conceptualization of a story taking place through the perspective of both the past and the future.
