Neil Simon's 'Lost in Yonkers' opens Friday

Opening Friday Night at the Kenai Performers Performing Arts Center is the Pulitzer Prize-winning Neil Simon play “Lost in Yonkers,” directed by Cherri Johnson.
    On KDLL’s Kenai Conversation Wednesday, she said it was a play she was well-familiar with.
    “When I taught at Kenai central this was the first show that I directed there. In fact, it was the first show that I had ever directed. I took over the program. Because if somebody didn't take it over, it wasn't going to happen. And I'm really firmly committed to teenagers having access to the arts. So I said, 'Okay, we'll make it happen.' And that was in 2003. And it was lots of fun, learned a lot. And so when I decided that I would, I was ready to look at trying to work with adults, because that was really intimidating to me, I thought, well, why not? It's fitting. Let's do the same show.”
    The story is set in the Yonkers, New York, apartment of a woman whose son brings her grandsons to stay with her.
    “So it's 1942, and Eddie Kurnitz is the father. He has recently lost his wife who died of cancer. He had, of course, no medical insurance and so he wanted the best for his wife and he went into debt with the loan shark and now he has to pay this back. Well, lo and behold, it's wartime and there's a job that becomes available that requires him to travel, but he needs some place to leave the boys while he's paying off his debt,” Johnson said. “He and his mother are estranged. She did not like his wife. She's a very tough, stern old woman very set in her ways. And her whole family is pretty much afraid of her. So he has to kind of go groveling to grandma to get her to keep the boys.”
    And when the boys move in, it’s a very full house, played, Johnson says, by great local actors.
    “So there's the aunt who lives at home with Grandma, who has some kind of a learning disability as a result of a fever in childhood. And grandma treats her like a child, and really does not give her the credit that she's due for all of the things that she's quite capable of. And she's just a fun character played by Nikki Stein,” she said. “Jamie Nelson is doing Eddie Kurnitz, Yvette Tappana is grandma. And then you have the two boys who are Kegan Kosky and Brody Ireland, great kids to work with. They have an uncle who's a kind of gangster-mobster want to be. His name is Louie and he's played by Rob Lewis. And their other aunt is Gert, who is played by Anne Marie Redstrum and she has grown up so afraid of grandma that when she talks, she kind of chokes on her words.”
    Lost in Yonkers opens Friday evening at the Kenai Performers’ playhouse on K-Beach Road. Tickets are available online or at the door. It will run for two weekends.