What If Baby Grows Up Gay?

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

In a review so deft that even its target has quoted it with pleasure, Walter Kerr once observed that Neil Simon did not have an idea for a new play that season but wrote it anyway. Jonathan Tolins, a 26-year-old Harvard graduate with Simonesque style and polemic aspirations, had a whale of an idea for The Twilight of the Golds. He just didn't write a play to fulfill it.

The idea is headline simple: if genetic testing allowed parents to know that their child in the womb would probably grow up gay, would they abort the fetus and try again for a straight one? To make the decision tougher, Tolins gives the prospective mother (Jennifer Grey) a beloved brother (an engagingly prickly Raphael Sbarge) who is flamboyantly gay.

The brother pleads for the child's life, taking the thought of an abortion not only as a rejection of him but as an attempt to will his entire community out of existence. In a test of the boundaries of liberalism, this gay man is unwilling to settle for mere tolerance from heterosexuals: he wants his life accepted as fully equal, and if he cannot have that, he will turn his back on the family he seems so much a part of. His sister may say the decision is hers and her husband's, but the brother compellingly argues that the outcome reflects their deepest feelings about the worth of his kind of existence.

So far, so good. Tolins has defined the attitudinal chasm separating gays, who think of themselves as a people with a history and culture, and kindly disposed heterosexuals who think of gays as individual mistakes of nature. But in making the family Jewish, he clutters the argument with a lot of dubious parallels to the Holocaust. At the same time, he opts for cliche comedy based on ethnic stereotypes (the Jewish mother force-feeding her son, the father showering his adult children with money) and cheap pop references (Dances with Wolves, The Mary Tyler Moore Show). He probably knows his audience: at a preview, the crowd gave star-entrance applause to David Groh, erstwhile husband on the sitcom Rhoda and a veteran of the soap opera General Hospital.

Twilight often resembles a couple of far less weighty Jewish family comedies now on Broadway, The Sisters Rosensweig and a slick new romance between sexagenarians, Mixed Emotions -- except it isn't nearly as good. Arvin Brown's ham-fisted direction leads to stilted acting from everyone save Sbarge and Michael Spound as his whiny brother-in-law.

The production's most blatant pitch to the sensibilities of middle-class matinee ladies comes when the mother (Judith Scarpone) moans about living in a world of moral complexity and invites the audience to share her nostalgia for the days when everyone seemed alike -- not, she adds, that she has any prejudices. This overwrought, distasteful monologue consistently brings shouted agreement and applause. Of course, Tolins is having it both ways: in allowing straights to vent a tacit wishing-away of gays, he validates his fears of a gene-engineered apocalypse.

W.A.H. III