Odd Man In

By T.E.K.

FIND YOUR WAY HOME by JOHN HOPKINS

This is the familiar triangle plot with one rather unsettling difference--the "other woman" is a young man. Alan Harrison (Lee Richardson) is a respectable British businessman of 47. He has been married for 20 years and is the father of two grown children. For some 15 years he has been a compulsive philanderer, mostly with women. Yet the only genuine and wrenching affection he has felt has been for a man young enough to be his son: 23-year-old Julian Weston (Michael Moriarty). A year before the play begins, Alan had left Julian. Now he has been impelled instinctively to return.

The drama unfolds with undistracted simplicity, eloquence and force. In Act I, Julian reveals the anguish and hysteria to which he was driven by Alan's abandonment. The two are reconciled and go to bed together. In Act II, Alan's wife Jacqueline makes a touching plea for Alan's return, but he refuses. In Act III, Alan discovers the seamy side of Julian: that he has been the most indiscriminate sort of male prostitute. Yet the two men finally agree that to deny their love for each other would be to make life not worth living.

Find Your Way Home is the most outspoken and honest play about homo sexuality that has ever appeared on Broadway. Yet nothing is said or done onstage in order to titillate an audience of either gays or straights. British Play wright Hopkins makes three serious points and makes them well. The first of these affirms what Diana Trilling has written of D.H. Lawrence: "The sexual ity which Lawrence celebrated was mat ing. What the present generation means by love-making is coupling." Alan and Julian make love in Lawrence's sense.

Secondly, Hopkins shows how heavily attitudes toward homosexuality are socially conditioned. If Alan were leaving his wife for another woman, she would be dismayed but resigned. It is the social stigma and the half-sniggering, half-pitying gossip of friends and acquaintances that disturb her so deeply.

Hopkins' third point -- and it is the lesson of so great a writer as Proust -- is that love is indivisible. Whatever its form of expression, the essence of love never differs. Hopkins never makes any of these points as didactic arguments.

They are implicit in his play and made explicit by a fine cast. Jane Alexander is exceptional in conveying grief, shock and wifely possessiveness. And Moriarty, Richardson, and John Ramsey as a one-night pickup, never take an emotionally false step.

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