Twilight Plays to Laughs and Issues, Too

Opening the SpeakEasy Stage Company's fifth season is Jonathan Tolins' The Twilight of the Golds, an over-the-top but entertaining look at the darker side of scientific progress. The play focuses on Rob Stein (Jeff Miller) and Suzanne Gold-Stein (Serena Berne), a happy yuppie couple who discover through genetic testing that their unborn child is going to be gay. In the end, they decide it's in the best interest of all to terminate the pregnancy.

Leading us through the high drama--forced laughs mixed with enforced tears--is the play's hero, Suzanne's gay younger brothe, David Gold, played wonderfully by Harvard undergrad Colin S. Stokes '96. Tolins makes it quite difficult for the audience not to fall for David. He is the beloved, ever optimistic opera queen-next-door, who wants nothing more than to bring the uplifting and transformative magic of the opera into people's lives, particularly his family's.

Naturally, David is horrified that his sister would even consider having an abortion simply because of the child's sexual orientation. He sees his own life being "rubbed out" along with the fetus. Suzanne, in turn, resents David's intrusion into what she considers to be a very private affair. The senior Golds. Walter (Stephen Epstein) and Phyllis (Sarah Pollen) tread lightly around the situation. They want to respect their daughter's privacy and final decision, but they also want David clued-in to what is going on in the family. The last thing they want as precisely what they get: a blowout where Walter basically admits to his won that, had he been provided with the same genetic information, he would have made the same decision as his daughter. In this scene, emotions are at a peak; we feel the bonds of family tearing already, yet compared to other highly emotional scenes in the play, it doesn't stand out as much as it should. Director Paul Daigneault should have toned down his actors. Throughout the show their words are too high-pitched and we miss out on the natural range that we expect in human interactions. We only rarely catch the more subtle manifestations of grief and helplessness.

On the whole, the acting is fine, if it is a bit overdone. Stokers, Berne, Polen and Epstein do a good job in portraying the Gold clan in its glorious maelstrom of neurosis and fierce love for one another. The sets in which the characters sit, argue and agonize are marvelous. A salute should most definitely go to set designer Matthew Lavesque for the just-right yuppie Manhattan apartment, complete with a colorful DNA molecule model perched neatly on the television set--cheap symbolism, but it looks good.

Paranoia is the undercurrent we hear rumbling throughout The Twilight of the Golds. The message is clear: Gay men land those who love them should get up in arms lest they be eradicated from the planet. If we're not careful, we'll lose out on good citizens like David Gold. This discourse of extermination Tolins initiates, which we are supported to hear as a Holocaust echo, is unconstructive and leaves us mired at square one What Tolins does do well and should have done more of is examine why the Gold-Steins wealthy, educated liberals, the people we would expect least likely to about a fetus because of its sexual orientation... embrace the idea that a life made difficult by homophobia is a life that shouldn't be to begin with.

In short, The Twilight of the Golds as about what humans do when thrusted into god like positions. Who has the right to do what-and why Who benefits' Who loves. The play gets its name from Wagner's Twilight of the Gods, the final opera in his epic Ring Cycle. But other than being David's current operatic obsession and occasioning some very nifty sound and visual effects, the Wagner link is really nothing more than a pretty connection that distracts more than it enriches.

Yet with all its faults, The Twilight of the Golds deserves a meaningful look. It'll tick you off for a number of reasons, make you laugh (listen for the planting trees in Golan Heights joke) and maybe shed some tears When it originally opened in New York two years ago, one woman found the play so moving that she look out an ad in the Times in an effort to raise money to keep the production afloat for as long as possible. If nothing else, The Twilight of the Golds is a gripping story, important and timeless, it seems, with each day that passes.