Brighton Beach Memoirs | Portrait of the Artist As a Young Saint

While calling the play's humor ''surefire,'' Gill's ultimate appraisal of Brighton Beach Memoirs finds the play stumbling into "shallowness'' when Simon awkwardly strives for profound sentiments.

Neil Simon's "Brighton Beach Memoirs" at the Alvin, is a sentimental comedy decorated with surefire one-liners and inadvertently revealing its shallowness by means of an occasional awkward lunge in the direction of what the author evidently believes to be profundity. (In the midst of all his jokes about adolescent sex and domineering Jewish mothers in the nineteen-thirties, Simon manages to introduce the fate of European Jewry under Hitler, borrowing from that historic tragedy a weight of emotion that his ramshackle little comedy has done nothing to deserve.) Simon has...

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