Christopher Gorman’s A Letter From Ethel Kennedy should be seen for what it chronicles rather than what it accomplishes. A plague that has affected tens of millions should be worth our attention when its effects are pared down to four lives. The Studio Repertory does a fair job of conveying this problematical autobiographical study (at Perishable Theatre through June 24).
This play entered the conversation about AIDS because its playwright earned a voice as a victim of the disease. We all listen politely because of the subject and respectfully because Gorman died before seeing the work finally open, in New York in 2001. This is its Rhode Island premiere.
All three scenes are set in the same busy Manhattan theater district restaurant, as Kit Conway (Mark D. Johnson), who has been dying of AIDS for 13 years, talks with his mother, father, and former lover. He is writing a play, and they each are concerned about how they will come across in it. The characters are distracted by poor service from the waiter (Jay Vescera) (and we are avoidably distracted by orders of ginger ale being served in glasses half-full and the Jack Daniel’s not being brown).
The opening conversation, or salvo, is with his mother, Bridget (JoAnn Bromley). Kit is lobbing softballs rather than bombshells, since she has long known he is dying, so the impact is minimal. She asks: “Isn’t there anything you can do so that you don’t look so gaunt?” When he later reminds her that he has AIDS, her response is: “I’m not ready for that.”
Both parents have long accepted his homosexuality, and his mother goes so far as to say, “I get great comfort from knowing you’ve been loved.” With Gorman burying that line in the play, we can be left with the impression that the playwright understands her less than she does him. Director Anthony F. DeRose and actress Bromley don’t manage to provide Bridget with an emotional undercurrent for us to glimpse now and then — fear? sorrow? (She insists that she does have feelings: “They float on top of vodka, but they’re there.”) So eventually when she relates, to Kit’s former boyfriend, Matthew, how she can’t imagine coping later — “My son is dead; I'll have the New England clam chowder. My son is dead; I'll have a pound of the lean ground beef” — we’re not as affected as we might be.
The mother relationship is the most significant for this play, but the one with Kit’s father is the clearest. Jimmy Conway (Jonathan Breindel) had trouble adjusting to having a little boy who, in pumps and purse, wanted to be a big girl. Yet he is the one who accepted, and instructed his wife in the fact, that Kit and his pal Harrison, while teenagers, were more than friends. (One of the few characterizing surprises in the play comes up concerning this exchange.)
With Ash Wednesday crosses as reminders of mortality on the foreheads of his son and himself, this working-class man who dreads being dismissed as an Archie Bunker in his son’s play recites the “quality of mercy” speech from The Merchant of Venice, and that doesn’t come across as straining for effect. Breindel gets understatedly poignant here, as does DeRose later, playing Matthew in a sad conversation with his former lover’s mother. DeRose gives focus to a role blurred by contradictions in the character.
