Tana Hicken and Holly Twyford in Theater J’s “Lost in Yonkers”

Despite its World War II period setting and the old-fashioned feel of its Broadway by way of the Catskills laughs, Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers feels remarkably of the moment. A father is driven to bankruptcy trying to take care of his dying wife. In tough economic times, he joins the war effort to get himself out of debt, leaving his two teenage sons in the care of his stern mother, who also has an adult child still living at home. It seems like a plausible early 21st century storyline. Except that today when we have to treat the catastrophic illnesses of uninsured loved ones, we end up owing more than we can pay to banks, instead of the loan sharks Simon’s Eddie has to pay. OK, so maybe it’s not that different.

Yonkers is often billed as a “coming of age story,” which makes some sense, as Simon tells his story from the perspective of the two teenage boys who do a lot of growing up over the course of ten months spent in the care of their difficult grandmother. But the play is really about the two women, Grandma and Bella, who share the Yonkers apartment where the entire play takes place and run the ice cream fountain on the ground floor. Theater J wisely flexes most of their casting muscle on these two roles, bringing back together Tana Hicken and Holly Twyford, who were so electrifying onstage last year in Studio’s Road to Mecca. Their chemistry is undiminished here, in roles that make more literal the mother-daughter connection of their previous work.