Scars of the '60s

By T.E. Kalem

KENNEDY'S CHILDREN

by ROBERT PATRICK

The '70s are the hangover of the '60s. The headiest intoxicant of that decade was youth, the perennial firewater of the U.S. imagination and temperament. The country is youth prone the way some people are accident prone. But the young are the least reliable guides to the future since they have not been there. In the '60s their parents, their teachers, almost all of the people who ought to have been the mentors of semiformed minds, genuflected before the whims, threats, and often asinine behavior of the young. These elders lacked the conviction to offer guidance since they had almost casually divested themselves of a faith in God, country and family, strands without which the fabric of a society rots.

Wistful Hopes. Kennedy's Children is an incisive portrait of that sadly lost generation's wistful hopes and bewildered and embittered disenchantment. It is more of a documentary than a play. In the mandatory "confessional" bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1974, five representational figures address monologues to the audience. They never at any time speak to or relate to each other, except that they all bear the scars of the '60s wars.

Wanda (Barbara Montgomery) devotes herself to reminiscences of President Kennedy, whom she adored and still mourns. In the hands of Playwright Patrick, those are still extremely poignant memories. Sparger (Don Parker) is a homosexual actor from the off-off-Broadway cafe scene, and he provides acerbic comic relief. Mark (Michael Sacks) is a pill-popping veteran of Viet Nam trying to sort out the dubious good from the known evil of the war. Rona (Kaiulani Lee) is the bruised child of Selma, Ala., and Woodstock, and Carla (Shirley Knight) is an ex-go-go dancer who wanted to go at least as far as Marilyn Monroe. In an altogether sterling cast, the performance of Miss Knight should receive a star of spun gold. Perhaps the most unusual "Kennedy" child of all is the man who wrote the play, 38-year-old Robert Patrick. Born to a Texas dirt-farming family, he emigrated to Greenwich Village in the early '60s, and over the next eleven years saw some 125 productions of his plays put on in cafe theaters and off-off-Broadway. Through some peculiar critical inadvertence, little or no attention was drawn to them.

Kennedy's Children will change that. Anyone who lived through or grew up in the '60s will find this an emotionally charged evening.

T.E. Kalem

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