Brighton Beach Memoirs

Eugene Jerome dreams of baseball and girls … but in his everyday life, he has to cope with the mundane existence of family life in Brooklyn: a formidable mother, an overworked father, and his worldly older brother Stanley. Throw into the mix his widowed Aunt Blanche, and her two young (but rapidly aging) daughters, and you have a recipe for hilarity — served up Neil Simon style! This bittersweet memoir evocatively captures the life of a struggling Jewish household where, as Jerome’s father states, “If you didn’t have a problem, you wouldn’t be living here.” The New York Daily News calls it the “funniest, richest, and consequently the most affecting of [Simon’s] plays.”