About the Play:

Brighton Beach Memoirs has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues, Male Monologues, and Male/Male Scenes.

Brighton Beach Memoirs is a full-length comic drama by Neil Simon. Here is part one of Neil Simon's autobiographical trilogy: a portrait of the writer as a young teen in 1937 living with his family in a crowded, lower middle-class Brooklyn walk-up.

Brighton Beach Memoirs will drop you right into the middle of Part One of Neil Simon's autobiographical trilogy: a portrait of the writer as a young teen in 1937 living with his family in a crowded, lower middle-class Brooklyn walk-up. Meet Eugene Jerome and his family, fighting the hard times and sometimes each other – with laughter, tears, and love during the heart of the Depression. Fifteen-year-old Eugene lives in Brighton Beach with his family. He is witty, perceptive, obsessed with sex, and forever fantasizing his baseball-diamond triumphs as star pitcher for the New York Yankees. Dreaming of baseball and girls, Eugene must cope with the mundane existence of his family life in Brooklyn: formidable mother, overworked father, and his worldly older brother Stanley. Throw into the mix his widowed Aunt Blanche, her two young (but rapidly aging) daughters and Grandpa the Socialist and you have a recipe for hilarity, served up Simon-style. As our guide through his "memoirs," Eugene takes us through a series of trenchant observations and insights that show his family meeting life's challenges with pride, spirit, and a marvellous sense of humour. But as World War II looms ever closer, Eugene sees his own innocence slipping away as the first important era of his life ends – and a new one begins. This bittersweet memoir evocatively captures the life of a struggling Jewish household where, as his father states "if you didn't have a problem, you wouldn't be living here."

Brighton Beach Memoirs had pre-Broadway engagements in 1982 at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles and the Curran Theatre in San Francisco. It premiered in 1983 at the Alvin Theatre and ran for more than three years on Broadway, winning the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. The play is regularly performed in regional repertory, high school, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 4 female, 3 male

What people say:

"Humorous and poignant—something to celebrate! Neil Simon's love letter to his past. … Brighton Beach Memoirs belongs to the family genre where the passwords are forgive and remember." — Time Magazine

"Brings a fresh glow to Broadway...In many respects his funniest, richest and consequently the most affecting of his plays." — New York Daily News

"Simultaneously poignant and funny. The characters are fully dimensional, believable... An outstanding show...the best seen on Broadway in too long a time." Variety

"Hilarious comedy...His finest play...A delightful and enriching experience." — CBS-TV

Neil Simon (1927-2018) was America's most prolific playwright. He had dozens of plays and nearly as many major motion pictures produced. He was showered with more Academy and Tony nominations than any other writer, and is the only playwright to have four Broadway productions running simultaneously. His plays have been produced in dozens of languages, and in 1983 became the only living playwright to have a New York theatre, the Neil Simon Theatre, named in his honour. His true success, however, is in his unique way of exposing something real in the American spirit..