A Sixties Sell-out

THE SIXTIES ARE DEAD AND GONE but no one is content. Whenever the subject seems buried for good, some writer, film director, musician, or journalist feels compelled to dig it up for further dissection. The corpse is now mutilated beyond recognition.

Robert Patrick now gives us Kennedy's Children, a play he claims is about the "need for heroes and leaders and stars that both made the sixties and betrayed them." In Kennedy's Children, each of five characters sits in a bar, gets drunk, and relives a personal and national tragedy. At the rate of ten platitudes per minute, they try to "unfuck themselves from the sixties." They fail and the play fails; the playwright, like his characters, cannot detach himself from the decade he is trying to analyze.

The play opens with a newscast of President Kennedy's assassination. The lights come up inside a bar in Greenwich Village. One by one the characters enter and introduce themselves in monologue. A middle-aged Kennedy devotee speaks only of "Camelot" and Dallas; a veteran tries to make sense of his Vietnam experiences; a young activist traces her life through riots and causes; a homosexual actor laments the "the good old days" of the Village underground; a starlet-turned-prostitute recounts her fourteen years mourning Marilyn Monroe's suicide. The play continues in a series of monologues: paralyzed by depression and doubt, the characters are unable to speak to, or even acknowledge each other.

Without dialogue, plot, or development, the monologues soon become tiresome and cliched. Patrick cannot sustain tension in this round-robin of self-revelation. He reveals more and more of each character, but he merely brings surfaces into finer focus, never taking us into the souls of the characters. The final speeches are searing, but we cannot empathize: by this time the characters have deteriorated into stereotypes capable only of synthetic emotion.

Perhaps Patrick works in easy formulas because he is afraid to deal with something more challenging. Whenever the play verges on some coherent statement, Patrick backs away and throws in a silly one-liner. "It's all right to protect yourself, but not all right to take sides," says the veteran. This seems to be Patrick's method of writing. Using humor as his shield, he avoids difficult questions and entraps his characters in a television world of pat phrases and petty trauma. We don't take these five anguished characters very seriously, mainly because Patrick doesn't either.

KENNEDY'S CHILDREN LACKS tension, rhythm, and climax--in fact everything except actors. In Patrick's play, five excellent actors wage war with a disastrous script. They lose, but their attempts to portray real people are worth watching. Michael Sacks, as the tortured Vietnam veteran, creates vocabulary of tense gestures and hulking movements. Barbara Montgomery evokes well the mythology that enveloped the Kennedys, but Patrick ruins her best speech with a cheap shot--moved to tears, she starts to sing the theme from Camelot. Don Parker as the ex-drag queen has tried to capture the whining intonations of a cliched New York-actor-homosexual, but when reading Patrick's lines he sounds more like Henny Youngman (How can one convey pain saying, "I think I'm having an attack of the truth?") Kailani Lee works hard as the frenzied activist, but gets the weakest lines of all; in the middle of a breakdown, she bemoans the loss of "Jimi and Janis and Jim."

Shirley Knight, as the failed sex symbol, is favored with Patrick's most successful character, her speeches filled with wit and wordplay. Knight speaks rhythmically, very sexually, building up to a climax and descending with a crash. Clive Donner also directs well, maintaining control during the more histrionic moments. Under his direction, physical movements augment the script and rescue the show from tedium.

WHEN KENNEDY'S CHILDREN OPENED at the Wilbur Theatre, heavy-handed music filled the theatre during the intermission and at the end of the play. "Help, I need somebody," "Yesterday came suddenly," sang the Beatles. "Bye, bye, Miss American pie," sang Don MacLean. Robert Patrick, who in press photographs wears a Wallace Beery shirt and wornout overalls, pranced around in a white satin workshirt watching his play, along with a suit-and-tie audience whose mean age was 45.