[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, "Brighton Beach Memoirs" deals explicitly with the Jewishness of its people. While one might fear that this development could lead to caricature, it generally does not. Mr. Simon's characters—the seven members of the extended Jerome family of Brighton Beach—are, for all their archetypal manners, appealing. Even though Mr. Simon is trying to come to terms with his less-than-rosy Depression adolescence, he looks back not with anger but with an affection that is too warm to be fake.

Thanks to these attributes, "Brighton Beach Memoirs" offers more surprises than any Simon play since "The Sunshine Boys." It is also, disappointingly, not nearly so good as one keeps expecting it to be. Oddly enough, Mr. Simon's kindness eventually extends so far that it has a boomerang effect: even as it makes us like the man who wrote this play, it softens the play itself. "Brighton Beach Memoirs" boasts some big laughs (in Act I) and some genuinely tender speeches, but it never quite stops being nice and starts being either consistently involving or entertaining. It's a pleasant evening, blessed with a handsome and highly energetic production, that lacks emotional and theatrical bite.

The makings of a more forceful play are certainly in evidence. Eugene, the 15-year-old hero …, lives in crowded, lower-middle-class circumstances. His household not only contains his father …, mother …, and older brother …, but also the mother's widowed sister …, and her two daughters. "If you didn't have a problem, you wouldn't live in this house," says the father—and that's no joke. Two of the characters have heart disease, and one has asthma; two at least temporarily lose jobs needed to keep the straitened family afloat. There is an offstage car accident; two of the children contemplate running away from home.

Mr. Simon uses the family's miseries to raise such enduring issues as sibling resentments, guilt-ridden parent-child relationships and the hunger for dignity in a poverty-stricken world. When the mother and her sister air a lifetime's pent-up angers or when the bone-weary father, a garment-district cutter, plods home from work as wearily as Willy Loman, we find real, eloquently stated pain.

But the author doesn't fully trust his material. He leans on Eugene's narration to spoon feed us his messages and, eventually, he sweeps both the play's crises and promise of dramatic tension under the rug. In Act II, most of the family's problems, moral dilemmas and conflicts are neatly resolved; by the end, Mr. Simon even reaches over to Europe to rescue some unseen Polish cousins from the coming Holocaust. Perhaps life can be this benign, but these happy endings are paraded so patly that they push an affectionate play over the line into unconvincing Pollyannaism.

In this context, the author's handling of his on-stage alter ego is highly revealing. No matter how miserable the goings-on around him. Eugene is usually ready with a wisecrack—and he records those gags in the composition book that is the repository of his first literary effort, his "memoirs." After a while, Eugene's good-natured brand of storytelling all too glaringly points up the deficiencies of Mr. Simon's own writing in "Brighton Beach Memoirs." We feel that a brisk, superficial glibness is papering over the rough edges of the lives in view—especially the hero's.

Eugene, in the end, proves less a character than a master of ceremonies. Unlike the others, this boy has few personality flaws—some slight selfishness and a rampant lustfulness for his 16-year-old cousin excepted. He is, as his brother says, "a terrific kid," and however preoccupied he may be with sex or the Yankees, he still gets nearly straight A's in school.

As in "Chapter Two," Mr. Simon's autobiographical stand-in is finally so saintly and resilient he becomes elusive and opaque—a vacuum where the play's sensitive center should be. At one point Eugene asks, "How can I be a writer if I don't learn how to suffer?"—yet we never really see him suffer. Eugene has most of the jokes, and they're not the bleeding kind: they obscure rather than reveal his true feelings.

If the play's undercurrents don't run deep, its surface mostly gleams. Mr. Simon wittily captures the texture of the Jeromes' milieu—where all gentiles are malevolent "cossacks" and where a contentious family dinner can, in Eugene's words, begin like "a murder mystery in Blenheim Castle." Though some of the Jewish mother, puberty and food gags are overdone, others are dead-on. Trust Mr. Simon to explain, hilariously, how Eugene's first wet dreams resemble "The 39 Steps" or to demonstrate how certain words must always be whispered in a Jewish home….

One hopes there will be a chapter two to "Brighton Beach Memoirs," in which Mr. Simon … [builds on his] often-endearing work by, paradoxically, trying a little less hard to please.