Whenever a writer gets around to presenting us with his own portrait of the artist as a young man, he invariably does two things. He makes his young man sensitive, very sensitive. A blossom on the vine that will wither and die unless it is promptly given succor. And he makes his young man a victim, a stranger in the household who is not going to be properly nurtured because he is so blatantly misunderstood; he must escape the obtuseness about him at all costs. You know how it goes. Now,… we have Neil...

[In the autobiographical memory play "Brighton Beach Memoirs"] Mr. Simon makes real progress toward an elusive longtime goal: he mixes comedy and drama without, for the most part, either force-feeding the jokes or milking the tears. It's happy news that one of our theater's slickest playwrights is growing beyond the well-worn formulas of his past. The other likable aspect of Mr. Simon's writing here is its openness and charity of spirit. Far more than most Simon plays, &#x...

Imagine Eugene O'Neill with a soft streak down his back. Imagine Tennessee Williams in a memory play just slightly cuter than it needed to be. This is Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs—it is effortlessly his best play yet, it is in its way the best play of the season so far, and it is strangely a slight disappointment.

Brighton Beach Memoirs is Neil Simon's Long Day's Journey Into Night. Simon is the world's richest playwright and he even owns the Eugene O'Neill Theater, but though you can buy the name, you cannot buy the genius. Actually, rather than into one night, the play takes us into two consecutive Wednesday evenings in 1937 (when Simon was ten rather than, as in the play, fifteen), but the pseudo-autobiographical hero is actually called Eugene, and there is an ostensible scraping off of...