FAYETTEVILLE — In Neil Simon’s “Broadway Bound,” a tight-knit but dysfunctional Jewish family falls apart.
In the Rogers Little Theater production, opening tonight, director Kaye Cotton’s tightknit and delightfully normal family has come back together.
The third in Simon’s autobiographical trilogy - following “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and “Biloxi Blues” - picks up when Eugene and his brother, Stanley, are looking for their big break as comedy writers. Their mother is waiting for the breakup of her marriage. And their grandparents are separated by their differing needs.
“I’ve come to believe that Neil Simon wanted everybody to know how important his brother was to his success,” Cotton muses about the play.
“And theyloved each other very much. It’s not a bitter show - although Stanley is terribly disillusioned by his father’s weakness of character.
“It’s just the next chapter in this family’s story. They still love each other - and they’re still in each other’s faces.”
It’s the next chapter for the Cottons, too, with daughter Casey Cotton portraying Aunt Blanche and daughter Kristen Begneaud working as stage manager for the RLT show.
Cotton and her daughters started doing theater together when the girls were little. The sisters, 16 months apart in age, might as well be twins in appearance and temperment.
Asked separately, both said thetheater bug bit them before they ever set foot on stage.
“Mom has always been involved in theater, and she roped my dad into doing ‘Barefoot in the Park’ with her,” Casey Cotton says.
“My sister and I had to go to rehearsals with them, and I just remember running and playing in the auditorium and how much fun we had.”
“Both of them were so talented, and I remember thinking, ‘I’m suspending disbelief here,’” agrees Begneaud. “I believed them in those characters, and they were my mother and father!
I thought it was so cool you could escape and be someone else.
“Shortly after that, Mama recruited us for the chorus of ‘Damn Yankees,’” Begneaud adds. Neither sister ever looked back.
When the Cottons moved to Northwest Arkansas in 1982, Kaye and Casey were among the founders of Rogers Little Theater. Kristen came home from Los Angeles and got involved, and even father Lee Cotton joined in for one of the leading roles in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” RLT’s first summer musical.
Later, the girls both moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where they remained until their dad became ill. Casey was the first one home, about two years ago, and Kristen and her family arrived this summer.
Like Simon’s autobiographical Jerome family, they’re all living in the same house at Prairie Creek.
“I grew up in an extended family home with my parents, my grandparents and my uncle,” Kaye Cotton says, “and I loved the togetherness - playing cards, eating together.
This is absolutely my dream come true. But we’re not like the Jerome family. We don’t have all that angst.”
“We’re as close if not closer than identical twins,”Begneaud says of her sister. “I know her like the back of my hand.”
“All my life, Mama told me, ‘When you grow up and get married, you’ll buy a house right down the street,’” Casey Cotton says with a laugh. “I don’t know why our family is unusual like that, but it’s really cool. And my sister and I have been best friends almost all our lives. It’s a relationship I’d hate to be without.”
Entertainment, Pages 19 on 11/06/2009
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