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 Simon's portrait of the artist as a young man, and Mr. Simon, as generous a man as ever was, has done three things. In "Brighton Beach Memoirs" he has made his 14-year-old hero, whose stage name is Eugene but who is plainly the playwright's remembered alter ego, sensitive enough, I'd say….

He is also a victim. He can walk into a room—a room in Brooklyn during the Depression year 1937—and without having heard a word of the conversation until now, fully expect to hear the expression "Eugene will do it." And he will do it, too, whatever it is, because he has no choice. He is the unelected slave, the permanent gofer, the knickerbocker kid on call for two Jewish families, living in overcrowded quarters, and if each day demands 16 trips to the grocer's—well, so be it.

The third thing Mr. Simon has done? He has made the artist as a young man funny—oh, Lord, he has made him funny—and I have repeated the word "artist" here to a purpose. The shrewdest of Mr. Simon's ploys, and very probably the best, is not simply to have made the boy hilarious in his likes and dislikes, his comings and goings, his sexual gropings. He has made him funny in the very perceptions that are going to turn him into a writer of some kind, some day. He has created a character, believably young and attractively innocent, whose habit of mind is to seize upon the discomfort of the moment—his or anyone else's—and to see that discomfort as lunatic. In effect, Mr. Simon lets us watch the comic mind growing up….

Though "Brighton Beach Memoirs" is probably Neil Simon's most serious play, as you may well have heard by this time, we are invited to watch its resentments grow and its angers flare through the eyes of a canny adolescent who has already learned how to translate trouble into high humor. It's an ingenious device and, given Mr. Simon's own special equipment, no doubt a wise and honest one. During the long, lovely first act, it leads to an extended scene between two brothers that embraces their counterpointed moods perfectly: Eugene's desperate eagerness to learn a little something about sex, older brother Stanley's restless preoccupation with matters more mundane and much more urgent. The give-and-take between them is warm, edgy, exasperated and stunned in about equal proportions and a masterfully engaging variant on what is, after all, very familiar material.

I confess that I am nowhere near so enamored of the play's second half, but—given the immense care that has gone into its crafting on all levels—I'm still not prepared to surrender "Brighton Beach Memoirs" as a whole. What happens, not too long after intermission, is that we tend to lose Eugene. The boy seems to have been retired to the wings, or possibly to the kitchen in search of oatmeal cookies, and instead of following the evening's new sorrows through his specially ground distorting lens, we now see and hear them in their resolutely ugly ordinariness. We become neighbors who have dropped in at exactly the wrong moment. (p. 3)

What is troublesome here is not that the recriminations are serious, though there is some feeling that "serious" and "unpleasant" mean approximately the same thing. The problem is really structural. There are simply too many donnybrooks in a row, too many venomous two-scenes back to back, too many couples determined to get into the act. The fight-card needs some pruning. Or it needs Eugene whispering his kind of comment from the sidelines. After all, there ought to be something funny to be said about one brawl giving birth directly to another. The play wants its gently comic vision back.

It gets it, before … dismissal-time; it gets it a bit sentimentally, but at least shapeliness returns. Meantime, Mr. Simon has at least twice done what I think he must very much have wanted to do; touched us. The emotion surfaces in odd places, not in obvious ones….

My own favorite brief passage comes as brother Stanley, in disgrace, prepares to leave home….

He is, as he should be, self-absorbed, and we're not really certain how well he understands his younger brother. Packed and ready to go, he hesitates for a moment in the doorway of their room, then murmurs reflectively that he supposes Eugene will probably turn out to be the writer he wants to be. "If you ever write a story about me," he says on impulse, "call me Hank, I've always liked that name Hank." Of course, that isn't precisely what the moment is saying. It is saying that he has been more aware of Eugene, and of Eugene's qualities than we'd supposed. It also says something about himself. Under another name, he might be better.

You may or may not mind the threat of derailing that overtakes "Brighton Beach Memoirs" during the hammer-and-tongs harangues that use up so much of the second act. I assure you you'll like the youngster who is going to grow up to write comedy. (p. 13)