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.

Simon is one of the significant English-speaking playwrights of the century. His position is as secure as the Statue of Liberty. And Brighton Beach Memoirs … was clearly intended as his run for the final touchdown.

It made it. But in a perverse way it showed Simon's limitations almost as clearly as his virtues. It didn't have the honesty of his earlier The Gingerbread Lady—particularly that first version of the play that was excised in Boston—and it was merely better written.

I enjoyed it a lot—I laughed and I cried, although dangerously I enjoyed it more when I was laughing than when I was crying. This was a proportion neither Williams nor O'Neill would ever have permitted us.

Simon here is returning to his past. The play has something in common with his very first adventure for our multiple familial recollections, Come Blow Your Horn. It is, not unexpectedly, a lot brighter….

[The humor] is typical Simon. He has a reputation for being a gag-writer who one bright day strayed on to Broadway and cleaned up a lucky fortune. Unfair.

The man in fact is a wonder at using words that sting the ordinary into the marmoreally memorable, of suddenly revealing to our collective unconscious a moment of recognition, a point of identification.

He is always brooding on the littleness of life and that wryly comic aspect of the domestic mini-tragedy. He is the poet of all our forgotten yesterdays—even if we grew up far from Brooklyn on other beaches and even, I suspect, at other times. His jokes cling to the air like iridescent, Proustian bubbles of times past.

The small things count. Listen to this girl—she is [the protagonist] Eugene's cousin and along with her ailing sister and widowed mother, has been given shelter by their uncle, Eugene's father. Now she is talking about her late father—he died at 36—describing him to her younger sister. She describes the wonderment of his pockets—a soft cave of surprises, its voluminous folds of dust and candies.

One day, soon after her father's death, she finds his old overcoat in a closet. Plunging her hand into its once familiar pocket she finds—nothing. Her mother had sent the coat to the cleaners. For the first time she comprehends and accepts the fact of his death.

Now this is just about as good a piece of dramatic writing as you are going to find. It is in no way innovative, but it nudges our perceptions and makes us understand ourselves. Some family conversations here—father to son, brother to brother, sister to sister—have just the right ring. The voice is different, but it does, I submit, have the same note of authority you gratefully hear in O'Neill or Williams.

But Simon always pulls back from the jugular. He never pushes beyond pain. He always shrugs deprecatingly, makes a slight Jewish joke and hides his heart behind his well-tailored sleeve. A pity. A great playwright must be prepared for the final plunge even if it kills him and he sinks without trace.

Brighton Beach Memoirs settles too easily for anecdotes. This is going to be unfair, but unfair in the right direction. Simon too readily confuses the Reader's Digest with literature, Norman Rockwell with Rembrandt, and Norman Lear with King Lear.

But—having got that aria off my chest—let me stress what a very lovely play this is. I am certain—if the kids of our academic establishment can get off their pinnacles and start taking Simon as seriously as he deserves—Brighton Beach Memoirs will become a standard part of American dramatic literature.