Kit Conway is dying of AIDS and before he expires, he wants to make peace with his parents, Bridget and Jimmy, Irish-Catholic to the core and not comfortable with their son's sexuality.
Out of all their regrets and recriminations, author Christopher Gorman has written "A Letter From Ethel Kennedy," an old-fashioned, comfort-food comedy that reaffirms the well-worn adage, "you can't go home again."
Home? Heck, you can't even have lunch with your parents in a theater-district restaurant without the past--and all its messy complications--coming back to further upend things.
Gorman's play, which the Manhattan Class Company opened Thursday off-Broadway, sets up these confrontations in three acts, first between mother and son, then father and son and finally a coda that attempts to put a comforting gloss on everything that has gone before.
At times, the play settles for sitcom humor. But the parents, in the fine performances of Anita Gillette and Bernie McInerney, are cranky and colorful enough to overcome the obviousness of some of the writing. Gillette, in particular, gets the most out of this pinched, unhappy woman who drinks too much, probably to blot out her difficult marriage and her son's declining condition.
Jay Goede portrays the acerbic, fortysomething Kit, cracking one-liners with the speed of a nervous stand-up comedian facing a hostile audience. The actor credibly captures Kit's willingness to recognize his imminent demise and to acknowledge his own failures, including the dumping of Matthew, his longtime companion (Stephen Barker Turner).
It's that sketchy relationship, though, that seems the most melodramatic and forced, although it does give the play its title. Kit is debating whether to leave one of his most prized possessions, a letter from Ethel Kennedy, to his former lover.
Completing the cast is Randy Harrison, best known as Justin on television's "Queer As Folk." He cheerfully plays a well-meaning if inept waiter who manages to irritate both parents while, as the same time, appearing to Kit as the youthful symbol of what he once was before he got sick.
There is a poignancy--as well as an unfinished feeling--to the play, which has been ably directed by actress Joanna Gleason. The playwright, a casting director, died last year of AIDS, and one wonders what would have happened if he had been able to continue working on it.
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