So nice to see Neil Simon back on the stage. It’s been many a season since he was dominating the commercial theatre, and the break has been refreshing for me, who has reviewed nearly everything he wrote, and for the work, represented now at the The Old Globe's White Theatre by Lost in Yonkers, his most ambitious play.

The cast of Lost In Yonkers.

^{Photo by Craig Schawrtz}

His “masterpiece?” Maybe not for the author of The Odd Couple and the autographical “three B's” trilogy (Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound.) But Yonkers represents the clown who would play Hamlet at his most sincere.

Simon can’t help but write funny, just as he’s incapable of creating a genuinely evil character. His gifts, though formidable, are tightly categorized as dependably facile and perhaps too sentimental to be taken seriously.

Well, there’s not much of that in Yonkers, a bleak story of a family sadly stunted by the fierce austerity of the matriarch, a sour domestic tyrant whose offspring bear the scars of her survival techniques.

Two of her children are long dead, and the others don’t come around very often except for the daughter diagnosed long ago as a case of genial arrested development. For 25 years, she has labored for the old lady, helping in the family shop downstairs, giving backrubs and fleeing whenever possible to the movies.

What makes this dismal landscape worth visiting is the arrival of two boys, brothers 13 and 15, whose father must park them somewhere while he earns the money to pay the loan shark who helped him through his wife’s long decline and death.

It’s 1942, and World War II is just getting ramped up, so there are good-paying jobs for men like this father, who has a heart murmur that will keep him out of the Army. But he’ll have to travel and the boys, sweet and lively lads of the sort who populate Simon’s autobiographies, are understandably appalled at the prospect of eight months in this Yonkers hell.

The old lady is equally appalled and adamantly opposed. It’s the sudden and unexpected assertion of the live-in daughter that actually launches the plan.

Jennifer Regan plays this child-woman with a giddy, radiant gallantry that would float a much less buoyant play than this. There are other vivid characters – Jeffrey M. Bender, mercurial and swaggering as the family black sheep seeking a hideout from the consequences of shady dealings; and Judy Kaye, so flinty she’s almost comatose as the old woman – but it’s Regan who will lodge in most memories, deftly milking every nuance from this flawed and sadly sunny cripple.

And this production, lovingly staged by Scott Schwartz, with both a solid grand design and a meritorious attention to detail, also enjoys the services of two very appealing and effective young actors, Steven Kaplan as the older brother, struggling to define and accept the growing demands of adult responsibility, and Austyn Myers, classic Americana in look and action, as a cheeky sweetheart of a kid brother. These two channel precisely Simon’s image of youth as hope.

Spencer Rowe as the father does well with a less-focused part, and Amanda Naughton plays an asthmatic sister as neatly as necessary.

The Globe’s new White Theatre holds Ralph Funicello’s memorable scenery of well-worn realism very handsomely, and Alejo Vietti misses nothing in costume accuracy. (I might mention that a leather football, very hard to find in 1942, would NOT have had white rings around it, but I won’t.) Matthew McCarty’s lighting was invisible – a compliment – except for the melodrama of the old lady’s first entrance.

Altogether, this is a bracing and laudable revival of a major work by a major dramatist.

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