All My Children

FOR ONE brief moment in our history, a young President John F. Kennedy stood for the symbol of American youth as vanguard, setting the trends for the rest of the world to follow.

Robert Patrick's play Kennedy's Children takes the lives of five teens at the time and puts them in a New York dive in 1974, 11 years after the Kennedy assassination, remembering. The result is a combination of perspectives, each equally jarring. But Kennedy's Children, playing at Leverett House's Old Library this weekend, goes beyond the separate facets of the '60s--civil rights protests, sexual revolution, Vietnam, and peace marches--to present a carefully compiled look at the complexities and contradictions of the era.

Wanda (Caroline Isenberg) remembers exactly what she was doing when Kennedy was shot. It is a moment frozen in time, a point from which her life's trajectory begins. Isenberg has a whiny, mournful voice, which tends to grate and becomes monotonous, but the tone does add to her air of wistful reminiscence. She believes in the story as in a myth, sees Kennedy as a Christ figure and a Camelot legend.

The details of that day unfold before her. She recalls everyone around her thinking that "JFK's going to pull through." Only she knew he had died, because she was Catholic and knew what the ringing church bells meant. "He's dead, the President's dead, God rest his soul," she says, forming a cross over her chest. That's before we know that it is Kennedy's death that has influenced the people we see. But it is underlying everyone's stories, even that of Carla (Heather Johnston) who is more preoccupied with the death of Marilyn Monroe.

Rons (Betsy Francis), still dressed in '60s radical attire, is the group historian, giving the run of events from one movement to the next protest. She joined the protests at 15 from her small San Francisco suburb, becoming a hippie, bringing the action live to every American through the TV screens.

Sparger (Eric Ronis) is an actor whose underground theater work and homosexual tendencies seemed to come into existence when Kennedy died. At 16, after three sailors mistakenly pick him up in drag and beat him, he crawls into a coffeehouse and begins a new form of theater with two speed freaks, becoming a caricature of himself. Ronis' performance is the most striking, strong enough to steal the stage, yet held in check. We feel his pain. And the strength of his portrayal is rivaled by that of a method one heroine addict named Mark (Harold Langsam), fresh from the Vietnam War. Langsam has a natural twitch that seems to come right out of the plastic bag of drugs he smiles for at the show's beginning. He shakily picks up a red diary, saying "Mom, I want to tell you about war." His eyes gaze on scenes of destruction: he is not with us, but in insight into killing, drugs. Buddhism and He tells his mom how he kicked over a castle one of the army men as building along the beach. It is as though he is speaking of our nation and the death of our 35th President. And that idea reverberates throughout--the collection of soliloquies.

WITH ALL these tales to tell, there's no way the production could fail. The only weakness is that the stories rarely mesh, leaving each performance isolated. Director Patrick Bradford tries to combat the problem by casting the actors in one another's tales. But because the stories are so separate, each actor tends to stand alone.

Ronis and Langsam seem to spread their wings and take flight, each going to new heights of expression, and taking the audience with them But others are less able to sustain the illusion Isenberg's tone of voice becomes distracting after a time; we wish she could be turned off like the TV newsreels her character must have constantly watched.

Johnston as an unsuccessful sex goddess is convincing, but her hardened view of the world's presented in a posed, hand-on-hip fashion though Bradford might have wanted a fashion pose took Francis as a hippy seems overly tired (may be from all the protesting) and her lines lack the emotion expected from a revolutionary.

More annoyingly, the staging is often unimaginative and stilted. Besides Ronis, who has the option of recreating scenes from his underground theater productions, the performers follow a predictable pattern. They each walk to the center stage spot, glue themselves there, then return to their seats. Isenberg stands from her clan twice when speaking, but doesn't move.

But these are small matters, not enough to man strong effort. When Johnston tells the audience frankly "The '70s are just the garbage of the '60s," she makes a strong and often-ignored point--as do all the actors, individually and collectively As the 20th anniversary of Kennedy's death approaches, revisionists give idealistic accounts of his place in history, and the turmoil his death ushered in is often ignored or manipulated to answer the hypothetical "what ifs" that accompany the Kennedy myth. In a performance both moving and unsettling, the actors and actresses in Kennedy's Children answer some of the questions of what is all really meant, and they ask some questions of their own. This is a play that looks at our past and future, a definitely worthwhile examination. Carla D. Williams

WITH ALL these tales to tell, there's no way the production could fail. The only weakness is that the stories rarely mesh, leaving each performance isolated. Director Patrick Bradford tries to combat the problem by casting the actors in one another's tales. But because the stories are so separate, each actor tends to stand alone.

Ronis and Langsam seem to spread their wings and take flight, each going to new heights of expression, and taking the audience with them But others are less able to sustain the illusion Isenberg's tone of voice becomes distracting after a time; we wish she could be turned off like the TV newsreels her character must have constantly watched.

Johnston as an unsuccessful sex goddess is convincing, but her hardened view of the world's presented in a posed, hand-on-hip fashion though Bradford might have wanted a fashion pose took Francis as a hippy seems overly tired (may be from all the protesting) and her lines lack the emotion expected from a revolutionary.

More annoyingly, the staging is often unimaginative and stilted. Besides Ronis, who has the option of recreating scenes from his underground theater productions, the performers follow a predictable pattern. They each walk to the center stage spot, glue themselves there, then return to their seats. Isenberg stands from her clan twice when speaking, but doesn't move.

But these are small matters, not enough to man strong effort. When Johnston tells the audience frankly "The '70s are just the garbage of the '60s," she makes a strong and often-ignored point--as do all the actors, individually and collectively As the 20th anniversary of Kennedy's death approaches, revisionists give idealistic accounts of his place in history, and the turmoil his death ushered in is often ignored or manipulated to answer the hypothetical "what ifs" that accompany the Kennedy myth. In a performance both moving and unsettling, the actors and actresses in Kennedy's Children answer some of the questions of what is all really meant, and they ask some questions of their own. This is a play that looks at our past and future, a definitely worthwhile examination. Carla D. Williams