Marsha Mason, movie star and muse, brings her ex-husband Neil Simon’s ‘Lost in Yonkers’ to Hartford Stage
Marsha Mason’s leading a revival of interest in the works of her ex-husband Neil Simon, including at a theater that’s never staged any of his plays before.
“Lost in Yonkers,” the semi-autobiographical drama which won Simon a Pulitzer Prize in 1991, is at Hartford Stage April 7 through May 1. Mason is not only playing the sourpuss matriarch known only as Grandma in the show, she is directing it (with Hartford Stage Associate Artist Rachel Alderman as her co-director).
The play is about the Kurnitz family, living in Brooklyn in 1942. After their mother dies and their traveling-salesman dad has to travel, their sons Jay and Arty are sent to live with their curt, stern grandmother and their “crazy Aunt” Bella, who is suffering from a mental illness. The boys’ boredom and anxiety is offset by a visit from their Uncle Louie, a low-level hoodlum who is on the run after stealing from a mobster named Hollywood Harry.
The play mixes broad comedy with themes of surviving as a family in uncertain times.
A legacy reset
When the regional theater movement began in the 1960s, it wanted to be an alternative to Broadway and mainstream theater, offering new works or revivals of lost classics and strenuously avoiding the most popular commercial successes of the time.
That meant bypassing Neil Simon, whose reign over Broadway lasted half a century, including dozens of hits plus having a Broadway theater named in his honor.
There’s never been a Neil Simon play done at the Yale Repertory Theatre, or the Long Wharf Theatre or, until now, at Hartford Stage. Simon was the most produced playwright at the Westport Country Playhouse when it was a summer stock house, but outside of a reading of “Chapter Two” in 2011 they haven’t done Neil Simon there since the playhouse was reborn in 2005.
Connecticut nevertheless forms a major part of Simon’s legacy, since he thought of the Shubert in New Haven as his lucky theater for out-of-town pre-Broadway tryouts. From “The Star Spangled Girl” in 1966 to “Proposals” in 1997, Simon had nine plays premiere in New Haven. This includes “Plaza Suite,” the 1968 set of connected one-acts that has just been revived on Broadway this month starring Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker. Other shows that Neil Simon tinkered on in New Haven included “The Last of the Red Hot Lovers” in 1969, “The Gingerbread Lady” in 1970, both “The Prisoner of Second Avenue” and “The Sunshine Boys” in 1971 and “God’s Favorite” in 1974.
And just about every Neil Simon play — not to mention his musicals, among them “Sweet Charity” and “Promises, Promises” — has visited Connecticut on tour. “The Odd Couple” alone has toured with all-star casts to The Bushnell, the Shubert, Ivoryton Playhouse, SCSU’s Lyman Hall and elsewhere in the state over the last 60 years.
Then there are Connecticut’s hardy small theaters and community theaters, keeping Simon’s name alive. The Suffield Players will be doing “Rumors,” which has been a community theater staple, in October.
Marsha Mason, who was married to Simon from 1973 to 1983, has embarked on her own mission to keep his name and legacy alive. She first met the playwright in 1973 when she was in the cast of his “The Good Doctor” (one of several Simon plays that evoke the great Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov). Their relationship inspired Simon’s play “Chapter Two.” Mason received an Oscar nomination for the film version of “Chapter Two,” and was also nominated for her roles in two other Simon-penned films, “The Goodbye Girl” and “Only When I Laugh.” She was also in the less revered Neil Simon movies “The Cheap Detective” (a sequel of sorts to his mystery parody “Murder by Death” and “Max Dugan Returns” and a TV version of “The Good Doctor.”
Hartford Stage’s “Lost in Yonkers” was originally meant to be a co-production between Hartford Stage and the Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey. Two River’s artistic director John Dias had originated the project, then brought in Hartford Stage. Then COVID happened, followed by Dias leaving Two River.
Hartford Stage’s artistic director Melia Bensussen decided to go ahead with “Lost in Yonders” without another theater co-producing. “I have enormous respect for her for doing that,” Mason says. “I’ve been wanting to do ‘Lost in Yonkers’ for a while. I really wanted to direct it and play it.” The last Neil Simon play Mason directed was “Chapter Two” for the Bucks County Playhouse eight years ago.
“Lost in Yonkers” is considered to be on a different plane than a lot of Simon’s plays. It’s one of a series of plays he wrote in the 1980s and ‘90s inspired by his childhood in New York City in the 1940s. Simon’s main three autobiographical plays are “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” “Biloxi Blues” and “Broadway Bound,” collectively known as “the Eugene Trilogy.”
“Lost in Yonkers” not only won a Pulitzer in 1991 but the Tony Award for Best Play. It was a memorable Tony Awards ceremony because Simon’s win was inadvertently blurted out early by Anthony Quinn who was supposed to be announcing the Best Musical winner. When Simon won for real 20 minutes later, he brought the house down by remarking “I was in the men’s room when Tony Quinn was on. Did I miss anything?”
Mason remembers
“Lost in Yonkers” is part of Mason’s emphatic return to live performance. “I literally sold the farm” — a 250-acre spread in New Mexico where she lived for 20 years — “and came back East to do theater,” she says. She’s been seen at New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre in Elaine Murphy’s “Little Gem,” “Watch on the Rhine” at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., and on the West Coast in Shaw’s “Arms and the Man” at the Old Globe in San Diego.
She’s also been seen recently on TV sitcoms, playing Arlene in “Grace and Frankie” and Pat Spence in “The Middle.”
As for her collaborations with her late ex-husband, “Neil used to say ‘I don’t think Marsha is right for my plays,” Mason says. “Then we wound up doing [a 1999 London revival of] ‘The Prisoner of Second Avenue’ and he said ‘You’re perfect.’”
“Lost in Yonkers” has plenty of laughs, and the hope-filled feeling of a family overcoming adversity. But it also has tragic elements, the classical sort of tragedy where the mighty fall, people are forced to live with the consequences of their actions, dreams are deferred and insurmountable challenges appear. Mason has some tragedies on her resume, notably playing the title in Frank McGuinness’ adaptation of Euripides’ “Hecuba” at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. One great tragic role has eluded her: “I always wanted to play Amanda” in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie,” she says.
Mason has a vision of “Lost in Yonkers” that’s darker and more dramatic than the1993 film version, directed by Martha Coolidge with Irene Worth (who originated the role on Broadway) as Grandma. Mason calls the film “kind of light,” and feels it was “shot with the Neil Simon brand of comedy.” She sees nuances in the script that don’t come out in the film. With its themes of immigration and social change, she also sees “Lost in Yonkers” as “quite prescient.”
In his later work, Mason feels Simon “ripened and matured and went in a different direction.”
Simon and Mason divorced in 1983 but continued to work together. “He wanted to be married to someone who could be there 24/7. He wanted something else, but we always had a fabulous professional relationship.” She remembers when doing that “Prisoner of Second Avenue” in London “he came to rehearsals and we held hands. We managed to work and live together with enormous respect and adoration.”
She recalls that “Neil consistently wrote every day,” describing his organized days of writing all morning, breaking for lunch or a game of tennis, then writing all afternoon. “He was always busy with something. He had a drawer filled with things he was working on.”
Had she ever envisioned herself playing Grandma? “Yeah, when the time came. Time passes. I’m always looking for something to challenge me.”
“Lost in Yonkers” is based on a phase of Neil Simon’s life that happened decades before he knew Mason, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a connection to it. “I knew his mother and some of his relatives. He dug deep into his past to write about what is the cost of survival. How can they survive if they act vulnerable?” She says the boys in the play, based on Simon and his brother Danny (who also became a successful comedy writer as an adult) are “witnesses” to the ongoing struggles of the older generation. Also, she notes from personal observation, “there’s a little bit of Neil in almost all his characters.”
“Lost in Yonkers” by Neil Simon, directed by and starring Marsha Mason, runs April 7 through May 1 at Hartford Stage, 50 Church St., Hartford. Performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at , with added matinees $30-$100. hartfordstage.org.
Christopher Arnott can be reached at [email protected].