LOST IN YONKERS, by Neil Simon, dir. Laura Jones  
By America's great comic playwright, this memory play is set in Yonkers in 1942. Bella is thirty-five years old, mentally challenged, and living at home with her mother, stern Grandma Kurnitz. As the play opens, ne'er-do-well son Eddie deposits his two young sons on the old lady's doorstep. He is financially strapped and taking to the road as a salesman. The boys are left to contend with Grandma, with Bella and her secret romance, and with Louie, her brother, a small-time hoodlum in a strange new world called Yonkers.

It’s Christmas, that wonderful time of year when families deck the halls, don their gay apparel, and pretend they don’t hate each other. College student Loretta hasn’t been home in two years mostly because she has nothing in common with her blue-collar parents. When she left to attend Harvard, she thought she’d never return, but then she fell in love with a cultivated Cambridge law student, and he wants to meet her parents. The play is a crowd-pleasing comedy about family, love and the one thing we all need to survive the holidays, forgiveness.

A DOLL’S HOUSE, PART 2 delivers explosive laughs while also posing thoughtful questions about marriage, gender inequality, and human rights…as much an ingenious elaboration and deconstruction of A Doll’s House as a sequel, and it stands perfectly well on its own…With unfussy eloquence, [the play] asks how much, in a century-plus, life has changed for Nora and women like her in a world that often still has firm ideas about where they belong.” —Hollywood Reporter.

The place is a “pleasant woods on the outskirts of Geneva,” where two superpower arms negotiators, a Russian and an American, meet informally after long, frustrating hours at the bargaining table. The Russian, Botvinnik, a seasoned veteran who has mastered the Soviet “hard-line,” is urbane and humorous but, at the same time, profoundly cynical about what the current sessions can accomplish. His young American counterpart, Honeyman, a newcomer to the arms-control talks, is a bit stuffy and pedantic, but also fervently idealistic about what can—and must—be achieved through perseverance and honest bargaining.

The setting is a squalid farm home occupied by a family filled with suppressed violence and an unease born of deep-seated unhappiness. The characters are a ranting alcoholic grandfather; a sanctimonious grandmother who goes on drinking bouts with the local minister; and their sons, Tilden, an All-American footballer now a hulking semi-idiot; and Bradley, who has lost one leg to a chain saw. Into their midst comes Vince, a grandson none of them recognizes or remembers, and his girlfriend, Shelly, who cannot comprehend the madness to which she is suddenly introduced.