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THE PLAYWRIGHT.
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Neil Simon is America's best-known living playwright, and possibly the most financially successful dramatist of all time. More about Neil Simon here.
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THE SETTING.
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The action of the play takes place in and around the Jerome house in Brighton Beach, a residential neighborhood in Brooklyn. The most populous of New York's five boroughs, with twice as many people as Maine, Brooklyn is home to a vast number of blue- and white-collar working families, many of them, like the Jeromes, the children and grandchildren of immigrants. In this regard, Brooklyn closely resembles Simon's native borough of The Bronx. The play also explores the myth of the Brooklynite: the urban Everyman: ethnic, straight-talking, spunky,down-to-earth, whose every-day life, now prosaic, now colorful embodies the big-city ideals of democracy and the melting pot. Simon draws on this image of Brooklyn when he shows us that the Jerome brothers derive their comic material directly from the people and situations in their family and their neighborhood. As Eugene says, "There's so much material in this house. Maybe I don't have to become a writer. If only I could get enough people to pay for seats in the living room."
In most ways Brighton Beach is a typical residential area of Brooklyn, a place mixing apartment buildings and smaller one- and two- family houses. Perhaps Simon chooses to locate the action here rather than in his native borough of The Bronx because of its closeness to the ocean. Brighton Beach is perched on the edge of Brooklyn, directly on the borough's Atlantic shore, as if to emphasize the tenuous hold on America of many of the newly-arrived immigrant families who live there. By the end of the play, the Jerome brothers will be preparing to move away from Brighton Beach to Manhattan, away from the margin of the city to its center, from an ethnic enclave to the cosmopolitan arena of art, communications, and business. The action takes place in and directly around the Jerome house. We see the street and the stoop immediately in front of the house, and the two stories inside. The setting visually opens up for us the private life of a family during a period of transition and crisis; but that opening is somewhat selective. Significantly--since this play is presented from the point of view of the younger son, Eugene--we see into his and his brother's bedrooms, though not into the bedrooms of his parents and grandfather. What happens behind those doors is closed to his view—and to ours. The home is an important arena in most of Neil Simon's work. The pain and instability in his parents' relationship with each other and in his father's relationship with his sons have led Simon to create a dramatic universe where the paramount values are those of personal responsibility, marriage, and domestic stability. Simon’s treatment of the family’s problems recognizes their comic side as well as their seriousness. The Time. The play takes place in 1949, in the years immediately following the Second World War. The date is important for a number of reasons. In general, this period is remembered as a time of important transitions in American life. Following the austerities of the Depression and the war, the country was about to embark on the unprecedented economic growth and prosperity of the 1950s. People everywhere would be moving out of cramped urban neighborhoods like Brighton Beach, and heading for the suburbs. For others, however, the economic system continued to embody the injustices of the past. As Ben, Eugene's socialist grandfather, says, "This country is getting richer every day from war profits. And whose pockets does it go into? To those who had the money before the war." Ironically, even as Ben rails against the capitalist system, he watches his children and grandchildren growing rich from its workings. His daughter, Blanche, wears a fur coat and rides in a chauffeured limousine, while his grandsons, Eugene and Stan, are about to hit the capitalist jackpot working for CBS. Perhaps the most conspicuous transformation in American life at this time was in the area represented by this corporate giant. The nature of popular entertainment and culture was about to change irrevocably, from a field ruled by radio and motion pictures to one dominated by television. When Jack, Eugene's father, learns that his sons are interested in working in T.V., he dismisses their ambitions saying, "Television? Ten people in this country have a television. There's no money unless there's volume." They would be better off, he concludes, keeping their current routine jobs. In this way, Jack demonstrates his lack of vision, while his sons exhibit their well-founded faith in the future of an emerging medium. Thus, Simon shows us how the generation gap in the Jerome family is widened by the specific conflicts of this historical moment. |
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THE PLOT.
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The Action. Eugene, the 23-year-old second son of Jack and Kate Jerome, narrates and participates in a series of events that change his and his family's future. During the first act, which takes place over the course of a single winter evening, Eugene and his 28-year-old brother, Stanley, struggle to meet an overnight deadline for a comedy sketch requested by executives at CBS. If the sketch makes a good impression, the brothers will be given steady jobs as radio writers. Meanwhile, we learn that tensions beset the older generation. Kate's father, Ben, lives with the Jeromes. When Kate's rich sister, Blanche, pays a visit, we discover that Ben and his wife are separated, and that the old man is stubbornly reluctant to reunite with her in Florida. We also learn of trouble between Kate and her husband when Ben informs Blanche that Jack is thinking seriously of leaving his wife. Later that night, as the boys in their upstairs bedrooms wrestle with the script for their sketch, Kate confronts Jack downstairs and finds out that he has had an affair with a woman whom he is still seeing.
As Act Two begins, a month has passed. Eugene and Stan have had their sketch accepted by CBS, and this is the night on which it is being broadcast. Kate and Jack have stopped speaking directly to one another because of the hard feelings over his affair. Instead they communicate strictly in the third person: "Would he like something to eat," Kate asks when her husband comes home at night. "He'll have something later, tell her thank you," Jack replies. As the family gathers around the radio to listen to the sketch, Eugene and Stanley anxiously await their responses. Although the whole borough is entertained by the humorous portrait of a typical Brooklyn family, the elders in the Jerome house are not amused. Kate feels that the jokes came too rapidly to understand; Ben, the diehard socialist, criticizes the lack of political satire; and Jack is convinced that the father of the imaginary family is a mocking portrait of him held up for ridicule before every listener in New York. That response prompts an angry confrontation between Jack and Stanley which ends with the father declaring that "I've outlived my place in this house." Later that evening, Eugene persuades his mother to tell him the story of the night that she danced with George Raft, a glamorous movie actor of the 1930s and 40s. The moment of communication and understanding between Eugene and Kate stands in sharp contrast to the anger and distance between the sons and their father. The next morning, Jack rises early and, suitcase in hand, walks out of the house, leaving his marriage and family behind. As the play ends, Eugene as narrator carries us forward in time, informing us that he and Stan became enormously successful writers, that they moved to their own apartment in Manhattan, that Jack divorced Kate and remarried, and that Kate's life ultimately settled into a quiet old age, caring for a precious family heirloom and basking "in the joy of her sons' success." |
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THEMES.
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CHANGE. The title of this play tells us what is most important about the action: the characters are on the move, bound to new destinations and new experiences in life. We confront a dynamic situation which seems to be spinning the men of the Jerome family centrifugally away from the past, from established relationships and familiar locations, and toward a future that combines fabulous promise and anxious uncertainty. Eugene and Stanley look forward to new careers in broadcasting and new lives in Manhattan while Jack walks away from his wife and his home, unsure of what may be in store for him. As the sons move into a new industry and the father embarks on a course of self-discovery that would become quite common over the coming decades, they demonstrate the impact of economic and social trends on personal life.
CONTINUITY. Although Eugene, Stanley, and Jack are moving in unfamiliar directions, Kate, the anchor of the family, holds fast to her connections to the past. Her commitment to continuity is symbolized in her love for the family heirloom she has inherited from her grandmother: the dining room table made by her grandfather before the turn of the century. As she says to Eugene, "The table you eat on means everything. It's the one time in the day the whole family is together . . . this is where you share things . . . When I'm gone . . . this will be your table." Once again we see the contrast between the actions and values of Kate and Jack. Whereas he deserts his family, leaving behind only an explanatory letter, Kate attempts to establish an enduring connection between her parents and her children. THE FAMILY. As we have seen, Simon's work is focused on the family as both the source of fundamental emotional and moral values and as the arena of painful conflict. Between husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, parents and children the bonds of affection and the barriers of hostility are in continual oscillation. For example, Eugene and Stanley inspire and irritate one another in almost equal measure as they work on their sketch together; Ben struggles to balance his love for his daughter Blanche with his profound political aversion to her rich and privileged life; and Jack and Kate both support and torment one another. Simon finds both humor and pathos in this eternally problematic swirl of family feeling. |
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QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION.
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