The new Compass Rose Theater, now ensconced in a storefront at Eastport Shopping Center, has been set up in part to let young acting students work with adult professionals.

From that standpoint, its first production, a proficient rendition of Neil Simon's "Lost in Yonkers," is a logical choice. Most of the play's action is seen from the point of view of two boys, 13 and 15.

These are demanding roles for student actors, as the youngsters are on stage for most of the two-hour play, and are even handed the expositional chores at the start. But while Eli Pendry and Will Fritz do well in these parts, the production works because the four principal adult roles are all in good hands.

Young Jay and Arty Kurnitz may get a lot of Simon's carefully honed wisecracks, but the play isn't really about them, and they're hardly the only characters to whom the title applies. While much of the 20-year-old play is funny, there's an underlying darkness to it as well: At heart, it's about how an emotionally abusive woman has damaged the lives of her four adult children.

Grandma Kurnitz (Lucinda Merry-Browne) is a scowling, limping refutation of the cliche about Jewish mothers being founts of warmth, understanding and chicken soup. The year is 1942, and the play is set in her apartment over the candy store she has been running in Yonkers, N.Y., for decades.

A widowed immigrant from Germany, in constant pain from a foot crushed in childhood, Grandma - it's no accident we're never told her first name - has brought up her four surviving children with slaps, blows from her cane, occasional incarceration in the closet, and withering contempt for tears and other emotional displays. As she tells her terrified grandsons: "You don't survive in this world without being like steel."

Jay and Arty are on the premises for this pep talk because their mother has died of cancer and their father Eddie (Anthony Bosco), desperate to meet her medical expenses, has gone deep in debt to a loan shark. Now the war has given Eddie - by his own admission the crybaby of Grandma Kurnitz's brood - the chance to pay off the debt in under a year by taking to the road to sell scrap iron. But in the meantime, his sons must be left with Darth Grandma.

While they work as unpaid labor in the store, and hunt for the hoard of cash Grandma has squirreled away somewhere on the property, Jay and Arty get plenty of opportunities to see how the you-must-be-like-steel child-raising philosophy has worked out.

Their father lacks self-esteem. Aunt Gert (Sarah Strasser) has gotten off lightly, with an agonizing speech impediment that flares up when she visits her mother. Uncle Louie (Daniel Siefring) has found a childhood of being treated like a rebellious prison inmate to be excellent preparation for his career as a small-time gangster. (Arty can't quite keep straight whether Louie is a henchman or a hunchback, but thinks that he's "like having a James Cagney movie in your own house.")

Then there's Aunt Bella (Brianna Letourneau), who had scarlet fever in infancy and is now 35 going on 16. Mentally fogged-in but good-hearted - if prone to unpredictable gusts of temper - she has remained at home, and paid the price.

Bella is less cowed than she appears at first glance, and wants more from life than working at the store and giving Grandma back rubs. Yet even Jay and Arty can see that her master plan - marrying and opening a restaurant with a fortyish theater usher with a "reading handicap" - is a pipe dream. Still, Bella's belated, heartfelt push for fulfillment leads to a climactic mother-daughter clash that is one of the best - and least funny - things Simon has ever written.

This is strong material - the play won the Pulitzer Prize for drama - and the actors at Compass Rose are up to it. Merry-Browne, the theater company's founder and director, has Grandma's implacable air of command down pat; attention gravitates to her even when she's just sitting in the corner knitting. Letourneau nails Bella's confusion, her warm heart, and the strong will that underlies both - at bottom, Bella is her mother's daughter.

Louie's extended scenes with the two boys do little to advance the plot but are fun in their own right, with Siefring providing a smooth blend of the avuncular and the menacing. And, Bosco, without overdoing it, shows us that Eddie - a good guy and a good father - has to choke down not just tears but panic whenever he nears Kurnitz's Kandy Store in Yonkers.

Jay eventually concludes that he's "learned a lot … some good and some bad" from his time with Grandma. Simon is an optimist and a commercial playwright, so what he seems to want the audience to learn is that growing up in a dysfunctional family is survivable - but leaves a deep and indelible mark.

Neil Simon has been funnier in many plays, but he may never been more honest than he was in "Lost in Yonkers." And that's what makes the play, and this production, worthwhile.