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In Broadway Bound, as in the other parts of the trilogy, Eugene speaks to the audience in asides. But here the voice in those asides is not the young man of the play explaining his inner thoughts; he is the older and wiser writer looking back and assessing the consequential forces in his life. Says Simon: "The audience listens attentively because it knows this character is going to become a very successful writer who will write the play the audience is seeing." This frank, almost naked address to the audience gives the play a startling immediacy, despite its nostalgic setting, and a confessional tone far less common in the theater than in the novel.
For audiences who come to the theater for feeling rather than anesthesia, for honesty rather than comfort, Broadway Bound should firmly establish Simon's standing in the top rank of American playwrights. He does not attempt to do what Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams and Sam Shepard have done: create their own worlds and mesmerize viewers into them. Simon evokes a world very much like the viewers' own and entices them into confronting their own feelings. Broadway Bound is the work of a master craftsman, at once literary and heartfelt, shaped with becoming modesty. It is unmistakably urban and Jewish American in its rhythms, its idiom, its fabric of detail. In Simon's first two decades as a playwright, that ethnic quality frequently encumbered his attempts to evoke a more general view of the human condition. This time he fully succeeds. In a decade already much enriched by Brighton Beach and Biloxi Blues, Broadway Bound is the best American play of the 1980s.
Appropriately, it benefits from an impeccable production. Gene Saks and David Mitchell, who respectively directed and designed the earlier plays of the trilogy, have renewed their contributions to the aura of heightened naturalism. Jonathan Silverman, who replaced Matthew Broderick as Eugene in Brighton Beach and Biloxi Blues and in the Brighton Beach movie, adeptly handles the dancing sequence, and he is exquisitely funny as the family listens to his and his brother's first radio sketch: he keeps covering his face, then peering out with mounting horror as he realizes that they realize that he meant it all to be about them. Chunky Jason Alexander, with his spark-plug, salesman's personality, plays a characterization of Eugene's brother Stanley that has shifted radically since Brighton Beach. That Stanley was a sweet and decent nebbish, acutely aware of his limitations. For the new Stanley, Alexander's neurotic edge and propulsive energy are just right.
John Randolph perfectly balances ferocity and fragility as the stubborn old socialist grandfather. Phyllis Newman must be likable, and is, as an aunt who was and is now guiltlessly rich. Philip Sterling has exactly the lost aura of a husband in search of something he cannot define and only recently realized he wanted.