Theatre 40 Production Offers Look at ‘Golds’ in a New Light

What if you knew that your unborn son would be gay? This question, raised by Jonathan Tolins in his play “Twilight of the Golds,” riveted Southern California audiences when the play opened at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1993 and then was roundly dismissed in New York 10 months later.

A new production of the play at Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills allows us to look at the debate with new insight. Not the debate about homosexuality. The debate about why the play was called “deeply human” and “complex” here and “simplistic” and “pretentious” there.

To recap: Suzanne (Michelle Manning) dearly loves her brother David (Artur Cybulski), who is gay and obsessed with “The Ring Cycle.” But Suzanne is shallow. She hates “The Ring Cycle,” and she’s a buyer for Bloomingdales. She always takes the easy way out--didn’t go to medical school because of the pressure, got married because being single freaked her out.

Now she’s celebrating her third wedding anniversary with Rob (the solid Ed Martin), a doctor who does research. Rob feels emasculated because Suzanne is closer to her protective and overbearing New York Jewish liberal parents (Gloria Stroock, Joseph Ruskin) than she is to him.

When Suzanne gets pregnant, Rob persuades her to be part of a genetic-testing experiment at his lab, and they find out the fetus will be gay. This flushes out everyone’s feelings about homosexuality the way a flashlight sends bugs from under the bed of a dirty hotel room. What David finds out about his own family is, to him, horrific.

But the story is horrific to an audience only if that audience cannot dismiss the Golds as ignorant, or heartless, or most importantly, not credible. If you should find the Golds unsympathetic, as the New York critics did, then the story is not a tragedy on par with Wagner, as David sees it, but a self-pitying tract that pretends to treat certain prejudices seriously but actually trivializes those prejudices by making the people who hold them obvious moral cretins.

The Broadway production cast the Golds as ethnically bland, almost-blank screens onto which, ideally, any family could project itself. As Suzanne, Jennifer Grey was so un-ethnic that she seemed to have had all of her facial features erased. Here, director J. David Krassner, has gone the other route. His Golds have a heavy accent, morally and literally. Most particularly, Manning’s shrill Suzanne is a Jewish American Princess out of “Saturday Night Live”; when given a gift, she waves her wrists in the air and shrieks like a spoiled 6-year-old.

Krassner may have meant to emphasize the messy humanity of the Golds, but he has done the opposite. When this Suzanne declares that she doesn’t “have the strength” to love the healthy, unborn child inside of her, sympathy goes so far out the window it will never come back, no matter how many times David compares his family’s plight to “The Ring Cycle,” which, by the way, is played at a very low volume here.

* “The Twilight of the Golds,” Theatre 40, Beverly Hills High School campus, 241 Moreno Drive, Mondays-Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Ends April 17. $10. (213) 466-1767. Running time: 2 hours.