MET gets Lost in Yonkers

Strong dialect work, from stringent German to blue-collar New York, is among the pleasures of the Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre’s Lost in Yonkers, a tenderhearted production that loses little in translation.

This Yonkers charms despite a flat first act, in which playwright Neil Simon’s notorious one-liners are at times sacrificed to a general wash of pinched panic. Family man Eddie, on the hook with a loan shark for his late wife’s hospital bills, hits the road selling scrap iron to make up the debt. While he’s gone, his sons, Jay and Arty, are forced to bunk with their dour and despotic grandmother, the kind of woman you might encounter in a Grimm fairy tale.

Director Karen Paisley applies a strong cast to Simon’s script, led by Scott Cox as shrewd mobster Uncle Louie and Marilyn Lynch as the indomitable Grandma Kurnitz. Young actors Zackary Hoar and Whittaker Hoar, as Jay and Arty, capture moments of authentic familial competition and camaraderie — the two are brothers in real life — even if they let a few lines droop at the ends. Bonnie Griffin, as their flighty Aunt Bella, pumps up the script with a series of self-conscious physical tics that make us simultaneously laugh and cringe.

John Story’s sound design neatly balances voice-overs with early-wartime radio standards during scene changes, and Lacey Pacheco’s mix of stage and practical lights imparts a warmth in tune with the script’s finale.

This is late-career Simon, after all, with jokes woven into wistful nostalgia and a bittersweet edge. Lost in Yonkers may be a comedy in the classical sense — cartoonish characters, an upbeat ending — but the laughs are more complicated when they come at the expense of characters so clearly stunted by a dearth of affection. “You don’t survive in this world without being like steel,” Grandma Kurnitz hisses. But Simon and MET remind us, in a humane and heartfelt production, of what’s sacrificed along the way.