Bawdy Rites of Passage Biloxi Blues

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Like many an artist who can calculate by the calendar that his fertile middle years may be drawing to a close, Neil Simon has seemed in recent writing to seek a greater resonance between his plays and his most personal recollections, and to yearn for the respect that accrues to a creator who examines himself. His 21st Broadway play, which is still running, was Brighton Beach Memoirs, a depiction of life in Brooklyn in the 1930s in a lower-middle- class Jewish household much like his own. It won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as best play, and was justly likened to Ah, Wilderness! and Our Town as a nostalgic celebration of lost family virtues. The show also made a star of Matthew Broderick; he won a Tony as the narrator, the precocious Eugene Morris Jerome, whose wry journal entries the script purported to be.

For those who loved the character, Broderick's endearingly klutzy impersonation, Gene Saks' straightforward staging and the humanity of the author's reminiscence, Simon last week brought them back in the second Broadway installment of a planned autobiographical trilogy. Biloxi Blues sends Eugene to Mississippi for basic training in 1943. He faces authority and danger, anti-Semitism and assimilation. He methodically loses his virginity with a prostitute (Randall Edwards), less for pleasure than as a rite of passage, then rediscovers his innocence in the chaste embrace of a Catholic schoolgirl. He confronts the chasm between his diary jottings and literature. In perhaps his least anticipated experience, he meets an age mate smarter than he is, not only in literary learning but in his grasp of human nature.

In contrast to the confident, even cocky kid of Brighton Beach, the Eugene of Biloxi Blues knows how little he knows. He is aware enough of the larger world to realize how many perils, including the war, may bar his path to glory. And through the nudging of his wise and principled friend Arnold Epstein (played with ferocious wit by Barry Miller), Eugene begins to grasp that his charm and amiability may mask the moral flaw of self-absorption. When Arnold stingingly accuses Eugene of being "a witness," devoid of passion and commitment, the insight may make an audience reconsider its feelings about the character and also its author, who appears to be musing self-critically about three decades of often bland ingratiation on Broadway, in Hollywood and on TV.

Nonetheless, the jokes keep on coming. Titters resound even in what are meant to be grim moments: the exposure and imprisonment of one of Eugene's barracks mates as a homosexual; a nervy confrontation between a drunk drill sergeant wielding a loaded pistol and a raw recruit whom the officer despises. The detached Eugene, moreover, proves Arnold's attack true by being offstage during these scenes; he is so passive that the viewer may long for a play that focuses more on Arnold. Inevitably, the sequel lacks some of the roundedness and universality of Brighton Beach: a military stopover cannot encompass the complex, cumulative relationships of a family. Still, it stands with the most telling statements of the World War II generation, or any generation that loses many of its young in battle, about how much of life is luck. After a fall and winter of disappointment, Biloxi Blues ranks as the best new American play of the Broadway season.