Brighton Beach Memoirs is part one of Neil Simon's autobiographical trilogy: a portrait of the writer as a Brooklyn teenager in 1937 living with his family in crowded, lower middle class circumstances. Eugene, the young Neil Simon, is the narrator and central character. His mind is full of fiercely fantasized dreams of baseball and dimly fantasized images of girls. The play captures a few days in the life of a struggling Jewish household that includes Eugene's hard working father, his sharp tongued mother, his older and vastly more experienced brother, his widowed aunt and her two young daughters. As Eugene's father says, "If you didn't have a problem, you wouldn't live in this house." It is a deeply appealing play that deftly mixes drama with comedy