Imagine Eugene O'Neill with a soft streak down his back. Imagine Tennessee Williams in a memory play just slightly cuter than it needed to be.

This is Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs—it is effortlessly his best play yet, it is in its way the best play of the season so far, and it is strangely a slight disappointment.

Simon is one of the significant English-speaking playwrights of the century. His position is as secure as the Statue of Liberty. And Brighton Beach Memoirs … was clearly intended as his run for the final touchdown.

It made it. But in a perverse way it showed Simon's limitations almost as clearly as his virtues. It didn't have the honesty of his earlier The Gingerbread Lady—particularly that first version of the play that was excised in Boston—and it was merely better written.

I enjoyed it a lot—I laughed...