Review by Booklist Review
Before Harvey Fierstein put gay theater on the commercial map with Torch Song Trilogy and La Cage aux Folles, Robert Patrick bestrode the genre like a colossus. For all his productivity of sharp, funny plays about gay life, he has remained best known for the nongay Kennedy's Children. This polemical sequence, by turns waggish and poignant, may change that. Each of these short plays occurs in a different decade, 1920s to 1980s, and concerns the interaction of men who, however tentatively or conditionally, love one another. Each ends, if hardly ecstatically, at least as happily as its decade allows. Tone varies with the times: the 1920s piece is Noel Cowardly arch; the 1930s play, bittersweetly social-realistic; the 1940s effort reacts giddily to the sociosexual changes of wartime; etc. The situations they develop are usually surprising, especially to nongays, but never utterly incredible. Always affirmatively (if not always proudly) gay, they are a delight to read and probably even more delightful on stage. Casts and credits to be appended. RO.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
