KENNEDY’S CHILDREN
The play itself is pretty simple. In fact, it’s just a collection of monologues. Five characters meet in a bar on Valentine’s Day and reminisce about the 60s. There’s a Viet-vet junkie, a gay actor, a schoolteacher with a Kennedy fixation, a commercial actress with a Marilyn Monroe fixation, and a lawyer who used to be an activist. There’s a minimum of dialogue, just enough patter to either punctuate or set up each ensuing monologue. So, what have you got? A handful of has-beens and never-weres, only casually related to one another, ragging on and on about the 60s to anyone who’ll listen.
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Back in 1975 this play eulogized a decade only recently buried in a shallow grave. Certain things were said in order to get on with the business of survival. Now, in retrospect, it smacks of dated revisionism. As Carla, the commercial actress, says, “I hate the 60s. I hate everything that happened in them, and everything that didn’t happen.” The sad truth is that Carla’s attitude seems far healthier than the overall tone of the play, which dredges up only cliches and propaganda from that era. To analogize, Maynard G. Krebs is to the beat generation as Kennedy’s Children is to the 60s — at least in this production.
The question is, how do you resurrect such a dated and recalcitrant play? The few discernible choices that director Paulette Petretti made seem rather lame. First, by updating the play from 1974 to 1987, Petretti posed herself an incredible problem: how do you show the additional change and growth in the characters without rewriting the entire play? The few Additions of contemporary color — a mention of Platoon, a passing swipe at near north yuppies — only aggravate an overwhelming incongruity. Petretti also tries to breathe some sense of character relationship, some actual dialogue into this play, in order to alleviate the discontinuity caused by so many serial monologues. It doesn’t work. Each character is inescapably sealed off in his or her own world, and propping one character up as a listener doesn’t make a conversation. Eventually, in turn, each character winds up pontificating downstage center to the two-drink-minimum audience, and there’s not much of a reception waiting down there either.
