THREE WAYS HOME
Each character’s story has a hole you could drive a Mack truck through. It’s both a compliment to and a criticism of Kurtti that her characters are more intriguing in what they conceal than in what they reveal.
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Frankie’s suicide remains a mystery. On one level, it’s just a plot device illustrating Dawn’s courageous survivorship. But Leelai Demoz gives such an electric, well-tuned, imaginative characterization that even a playwright can’t dispatch Frankie so easily. On another level, it’s not really a suicide. Frankie just flies off to join his surrogate family, the X-Men, since all the dubiously acquired cash and gifts that he brings home fail to buy him a place in his own family. Is it that he has no father? Is that why Frankie leaves a real world of depraved men for a mythical world of supermen? Perhaps even, on a haunting subtextual level, Frankie is the sacrificial male, making way and room for what Dawn calls her “good-luck child,” Dominique Sharon. But that sounds like something out of the Eleusinian mysteries.
