Lost in Yonkers

It is basically the story of a very dysfunctional family. It’s a Neil Simon play that is described as the story 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. Set in 1942 Yonkers in the two-bedroom apartment above Kurnitz's Kandy Shop, The father has to leave his boys with their grandmother who is, to say the least, a fearsome German-Jewish tyrant woman. All her children are delinquents, whom she controls completely, and the boys have moved into a hell house.

Eddie, the boys' father, is unease about leaving the boy with their grandmother. Sister Gert has developed a nervous habit of inhaling while she talks, and brother Louie is a bag man for the mob with a false bravado he calls "moxie." And then there is Bella, the mildly retarded daughter who most needs the love that their mother cannot give.

Jay and Arty the two teenaged boys soon learn their own techniques for living in this dysfunctional family and become a sort of comic Greek chorus to the drama of daily life in the Kurnitz household. It took nearly a year before they are rescued by their absent father, and in that time, they will discover, as does the audience, that of all the wounded hearts in the family, maybe Grandma's is the most wounded of all.

Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre