Back in April, Neil Simon was lost in San Diego with a play, ”Jake`s Women,” that he didn`t think was good enough to go to Broadway.
So he closed it out of town.
It was the first time, after 30 years and 24 plays, that a Broadway-bound Simon work had folded before reaching New York.
Exit: Lost in San Diego.
Enter: ”Lost in Yonkers.”
That`s the title of Simon`s new play, which is heading for a Broadway opening in February with Irene Worth and Mercedes Ruehl in leading roles.
The play will try out first at the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, then move on to Washington before arriving in New York at a theater to be announced.
The producer is Emanuel Azenberg, who has produced all of Simon`s plays since 1972.
Unlike his Brighton Beach trilogy and ”Jake`s Women,” ”Lost in Yonkers” is not autobiographical, Simon says.
”It`s set in the summer of 1942 in Yonkers, in the early days of World War II,” he says. ”It`s about two boys who have lost their mother and whose father is forced to go out of town and become a salesman to earn a living.
”The father has to leave his boys with their grandmother, who is, to say the least, a very austere woman.”
The grandmother, to be played by Worth, has other children who are misfits and whom she dominates completely, ”and the boys are forced to move into this hornet`s nest,” Simon says.
So is this a comedy?
”It`s like all my recent plays, with the exception of `Rumors,` ” the author says. ”It`s as much drama as comedy. Through the eyes of the boys, it`s a comedy; through the eyes of the other characters, it`s a drama.”
Simon says he is feeling much better than he did in April.
”A play that doesn`t work spurs you on to get back to the typewriter much more than a hit does,” he says. ”When you have a hit, you want to rest on your / laurels. When I fell off my horse with `Jake`s Women,` I wanted to get back on real quickly.”
He wrote ”Lost in Yonkers” practically non-stop, he says, five days a week, finishing the first draft in eight weeks and doing a rewrite in five or six more weeks.
”I think,” Simon says, ”I`m back on the right track.”
– The last year has been pretty rough for producer Emanuel Azenberg, at least theatrically. He was the producer of the ill-fated ”Jake`s Women.”
He was also co-producer of Tom Stoppard`s ”Artist Descending a Staircase,” which came and went very quickly on Broadway, and of ”Jerome Robbins` Broadway,” which, despite winning the Tony Award as best musical of 1989, closed at the Imperial Theater this month without even coming close to making back its investors` $8.8 million.
But fortunes change. For one thing, there`s ”Lost in Yonkers.”
Then, last week, the film of Tom Stoppard`s ”Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” which the playwright directed, was named best picture at the Venice Film Festival, beating out Martin Scorsese`s ”GoodFellas,”
among others. Azenberg is a co-producer, with Michael Brandman, of
”Rosencrantz,” which is to open in New York in November.
Last weekend, Azenberg`s daughter Karen was married. And a television drama he co-produced, ”Age-Old Friends,” won Emmy Awards for two of its stars, Hume Cronyn and Vincent Gardenia. Finally, the producer`s first son
(after four daughters) was born.
”His name is Joshua Philip Charles Azenberg,” Azenberg says. ”It`s been an exciting week.”
– ”I don`t see Inspector Javert as a bad man in any way,” says Robert Westenberg, who recently took over the role of the French policeman in ”Les Miserables” at the Broadway Theater, in which he pursues Jean Valjean through the streets of France year after year just because the good-hearted Valjean stole bread to feed a starving child.
”But the results can be evil, despite the best intentions. And I think that`s what happens here.”
”Javert comes from poverty and a blighted childhood,” says the 36-year- old Westenberg, whose other Broadway roles include Cinderella`s prince and the Wolf in ”Into the Woods,” Georges Seurat in ”Sunday in the Park With George” and Niko in ”Zorba.”
”His life has basically been a reaction to that. He has become an absolutist, which is a not-uncommon disease, even nowadays. His whole world view has been simplified into black and white. There doesn`t seem to be much gray he can abide. It`s either right or wrong, evil or good. There`s nothing in between.”
That kind of thinking, Westenberg says, often leads to Draconian results, ”as it does in this play.”
”Javert`s actions are unforgiving,” he says. ”When a man is a sinner, he can only be a sinner and must be treated as such. Javert sees himself as a guardian of the times and an upholder of the social order, which is paramount to him.
”At the end of the play, when he realizes there is a chink in the armor, that the system he has been upholding his entire life is in fact flawed, because a man he has deemed a criminal has just performed a gracious and forgiving act, that possibility blows him apart.”
