PARTING GESTURES
Live Theatre
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The story concerns a mother and her estranged adult son who are reunited for a few hours to attend the funeral of his father, her ex-husband. Told from the point of view of the son, the play at first seems to be about reconciliation but quickly degenerates into a 90-minute argument between parent and child about which parent abandoned the other and whether or not the deceased was a good father or husband. In the process, the two are forced (in the great O’Neill tradition) to confront the truth about themselves and about the people they at once love and hate.
And we couldn’t be less interested. The moments when the play really flies occur when the mother and son share stories that focus not on what the old man was really like but on the way they remember him. The Yankees baseball cap that was always perched on his head. The way the curved highway was reflected in his mirrored sunglasses. How handsome he looked in uniform the day he landed his helicopter in her backyard to take the starstruck 17-year-old out on a date.
Someone inserted a quotation from Pat Conroy’s Prince of Tides into the program: “I betray the integrity of my family’s history by turning everything, even sadness into romance. There is no romance in this story; there is only the story.” They hoped, I suppose, to make Lima’s descent into the hell of a dysfunctional family a more noble journey. Instead they only underscored what Lima missed in his work: that as mother and son spill their guts about what really happened, they are only constructing another set of fictions about the past no truer than the romantic stories they debunked. And they never reach that point the characters reach in Conroy’s The Great Santini, when the ambivalence and the anger and the sense of loss finally overwhelm them, and they cry. No one cries in Parting Gestures, because both characters, for all their talk about finally understanding what happened, are still emotionally constipated. They still confuse talking about feelings with feeling.
Especially disappointing are James Harvey as a mealymouthed Herod and India Whiteside as an emotionally withdrawn Captain of the Guard. Both characters supposedly lust after Salome with every atom of their beings, yet neither convince us for a moment that they are truly obsessed with the girl. When the Captain of the Guard commits suicide because of her unrequited love for Salome, we don’t believe it for a minute.
