Short on Stature

For his production of Robert Patrick's Kennedy's Children, Marc Talusan transforms the Loeb Ex into a bar. Instead of the traditional seating, there are dozens of little round tables, complete with coasters. Music from the late Sixties and early Seventies seems to emanate from a juke box in the corner. A bartender bustles around behind the bar. From the intensity of the atmosphere, one expects to be treated to an equally compelling play. The production never lives up to this expectation.

Kennedy's Children, set in 1974, deals with five survivors of the excesses of the Sixties, who drown their sorrows as they reminisce on a decade gone bad. Each character, illuminated in turn by a spotlight, speaks in a series of monologues. They never interact; only one character ever even moves from his chair. In the hands of a talented actor, this format is a challenge to work with pacing and dynamics to keep the audience's attention. Unfortunately, not all the actors are up to the challenge, and the production soon loses its novelty and goes flat.

Two actors handle the pressure of the roles and keep the audience's interest in the progression of their characters. Robert Levy gives the strongest characterization as the flamboyantly gay experimental actor, Sparger. At first, Sparger seems stereotypical, but as the play continues one sees that this is just a front for a truly painful and completely atypical past. Levy handles the comic and tragic aspects of his role with deftness and humor, carefully balancing the outrageous and the all-too-human aspects of Sparger's personality. Dana Gotlieb is subtly effective as Wanda, a substitute teacher for whom the assassination of JFK has become an obsessive symbol of lost innocence and missed chances. In Gotlieb's hands, the audience, despite gradually realizing that this woman's preoccupation with JFK is far from normal, never loses its ability to relate to Wanda.

Unfortunately, the other three performances do not match the caliber of these two and serve to weigh down and drag out the play. Ryan McCarthy's portrayal of Mark, the strung-out schizoid 'Nam vet, is so one-note that the revelation that he participated in a fragging incident, which should have been the climax of McCarthy's portrayal, gets lost in all the raving. Danielle Sherrod, as Carla, a flamboyant would-be sex goddess, is engaging and humorous at first. But her portrayal, too, is so intense as to lack dynamic, and her story, though flecked with comic moments, is ultimately predictable: good girl with high hopes burns out. Rona, portrayed by Kathy Twiss, is somewhat stereotypical: ex-hippie bemoans the moral void that supplanted the idealism of the Sixties. Rona reels off a year-by-year record of the protests of the Sixties, which is just boring. Twiss isn't able to lend much variety to her portrayal, and because Rona didn't go through much of a change until the Seventies, her obsessive rehashing of the Sixties is non-revelatory. When the spotlight settles on any of these three characters, one hopes it will soon move on to Sparger or Wanda.

Talusan and his crew should be lauded for their careful researching of the Seventies and their perfect evocation of the bar mood. Levy and Gotlieb do their part to capture the intricacies and dynamics of their characters. But neither the clever sets nor the efforts of these actors are enough for this production to hold together. Given the uneven performances of the cast, Kennedy's Children fails as an ensemble piece.