(temporary) twilight of the vokes

On Thursday night, Robert and I went to the Vokes Theatre, where I've had a subscription for over 20 years, to see Twilight of the Golds. All I can imagine is that last year's playreading committee was having a "what were they thinking" moment. I absolutely hated the play. I don't think other audience members were much more enchanted than I was.

TotG is a "play within a play." To the distress and discomfort of the other actors on stage, who were just reflecting the same emotions felt by most of the audience, one of the characters spends the entire play explaining the plot of Wagner's Ring Cycle (of which the last part is called "Twilight of the Gods" -- get it? get it? The TotG operated at about this level of subtlety throughout).

The playright decided to retell the Ring story *in modern times* (how novel). He seems to have thought he was as deep and articulate as Kushner, but missed by a country mile. He chose the following theme to illustrate the story: If you could do genetic testing when you were pregnant and you found out that your child would be gay, wouldn't you want to abort it? I mean, what would you do? (Gosh, love my child unconditionally? Now there's a novel thought!). And he chose to set the whole story in Manhattan in the early 90s. This would have been more believable set in, say, Kansas in the 50s, with characters who had never met a gay person. The protagonists were all Jewish (with bits of the holocaust thrown in for good measure -- remember I said this was subtle?) and one of the family members is gay.

To make things worse, the director's note said that we could all probably relate to this moral dilemma. To make things better, when the pregnant sister delayed her abortion interminably and finally had it in her fifth month, something went wrong and they had to do a full hysterectomy on the spot (huh?), meaning that she could never have children. The good part was that clearly, she and her husband didn't deserve to have children in the first place. And of course, this twist of plot meant that the line of "Golds" would die out entirely, given, well, that her only sibling is gay.

Oh, and then the subtlest twist of all -- the inventor of the test that started the whole dilemma was... you guessed it ... gay!!!

There were moving moments and funny moments. The set was beautiful and fitting. The actors were quite good, though they neither read as Jewish, nor did the brother read as gay.

The sweetest moment came a few days later when I mentioned to a coworker that I'd seen a tortuous play recently with a contrived moral dilemma. He interrupted me to say that he'd seen a truly awful play several years ago that felt interminable to him. It was called "Twilight of the Golds".