"Iron Kisses' at Act II Playhouse

There's a small episode in James Still's affecting family drama, Iron Kisses, in which Mom, driving brother Billy and sister Barbara home at night, hits a deer on the road and loses a headlight. The trauma of the impact and the sight of the dead animal are bad enough. But how, the kids wonder fearfully, will they get home without sufficient light to drive by?

Not to worry, they are reassured; there is less light, but still enough.

This moment might serve as the play's epitome. There's damage all around in this small-town Kansas family, a world of confusion and hurt, but just enough love to get by. The big problem is that Billy is gay, and it would be a great, big-city mistake not to recognize that there are plenty of places and spaces (some of them in big cities themselves) where a gay son or daughter is an incomprehensible, not to say unacceptable fact. Worse, though, when it is acceptable but still incomprehensible.

Loved, accepted— but not understood

That's Billy's predicament, and his family's. He is loved and accepted (albeit incompletely); he is simply not understood. Rejection is something one can deal with when it comes at you broadside, but when it takes the form of pained bewilderment, there is only a round of suffering and guilt, different— and differently isolating— for all who share it.

This is a four-character play (five, if you count Billy's silent lover, Michael), but Still has written the parts for two actors only (Tony Braithwaite and Kathryn Petersen). To complicate matters further, each actor plays both parental roles in turn. The result is that the first part of the play consists of a set of serial monologues, and only when the actors take on the separate roles of Billy and Barbara does dialogue result. This confuses a bit until one gets the hang of it, and then the point: each character is alone with the family situation, and his or her experience of it.

It might be argued that the same effect could be achieved by isolating and spotlighting the actors themselves. But the technique does permit Still to cut in and out of his characters' consciousness in ways that mere staging perhaps could not.

The many varieties of family loneliness

There's a good deal more to this family's internal isolation than Billy's sexuality, of course, which is in a sense rather drawn out than created by the single polarizing issue around which the play revolves. Still is sensitive to the many kinds of loneliness family life can contain, treating them with both pathos and wit. Both performers play their multiple roles skillfully, and Harriet Power's direction evokes sentiment while avoiding sentimentality, always a pitfall in material of this kind.

You may think you've seen the "gay problem play" before (and you certainly have, if you've ever seen Tennessee Williams). But Still— whose career to date includes a Pulitzer nomination— is a voice worth hearing.