THE STAGE:

...This is an ideational choice as much as a technical one, since each of them is immersed in his own sense of loss...

...The thematic repetition manages finally not so much to convince me of the validity of the pictured wasteland as to remind me of the fashionable commonplaces about lostness and failed communication sentimentally present in the early Patrick plays...

...For Sparger, whose story of the rise and fall of off-off-Broadway is an account of a decline from inspired amateurs making theater to would-be professionals making their way, the gruesome suicide of the clown Buffo marks the end of any kind of artistic community...

...She recalls the day of the assassination, the shock of the news which forced her out of her trivial job-doing paste-up for a coiffeur magazine-into a decision to try, in her small way, to do some good in the world, to finish the job presumably cut off by that bullet in Dallas...

...Kennedy's Children, which has made its way from off-off-Broadway to a pub theater in London to the West End and back to Broadway, is at once static and stereotypical, a full-length cousin of short plays like Still-Love and Camera Obscura...

...His play, which takes place inside a bar on the lower East Side of New York, ten years after the President's death, introduces us to five characters, each of whom is an illustration of dreams gone dead, idealism gone sour...

...For Carla, who dreamed of being a sex goddess, the 1960s began to come apart with the suicide of Marilyn Monroe, who in retrospect becomes not only the last of the mythic glamour stars-but in the age of the media-celebrated drag queens and the interchangeable seduction robots on TV ads-a last human being in a profession turning plastic...

...The few plays of his that I have read or seen strike me as lightly animated ideas rather than strongly conceived dramatic or theatrical situations, and the ideas tend toward cliche...

...Patrick, like so many other American writers, sees the assassination of Kennedy as the symbolic destruction of hope-a destruction that would need a decade to reveal itself fully...

...This time, however, Patrick may find a larger audience because Kennedy's Children is a reflection of the very real malaise-political, artistic, spiritual-that has marked the early 1970s and has made indifference (sometimes disguised as naked self-interest) the sign of the times...

...yet, the juxtaposition of monologues shows them as variations on a single theme...

...Every day I see evidence among my colleagues and my students, and in myself, of the malaise I mentioned in the first paragraph, but it is neither as relentless nor as consistently crippling as the patness of Kennedy's Children suggests...

...She is studying for a teaching certificate and doing part-time work with children with learning problems, yet the positive possibilities in the character are undercut by the fact that she lives completely in the Camelot myth, fondling that once-upon-a-time when the brightest and most beautiful couple were presumably leading this country toward a paradisiacal future...

...Rona and her husband Robbie, about whom she tells us a great deal, began the decade as discontented middle-class children who set out to change the world- civil-rights marches, peace marches, poverty marches- and who learned to crown each disappointment with a new scene, to find hope in drugs or the new music, in odd clothes or long hair, to become love children or flower children...

...The play is most impressive on those too rare occasions when the performers transcend the material-when Kaiulani Lee delivers Rona's last anguished speech or when Shirley Knight, as Carla, turns an album of pin-up poses into funny social comment that is also an indication of personal pain...

...By the end of the play, the vision is somewhat blurred by the whiskey that helps sustain it, and Wanda's last speech describes her attempt to explain the assassination to children who do not know the Kennedy name and who can only be excited by the sight of blood in the famous Life photograph...

...Metaphorically, he has joined hands with the offstage Robbie...

...GERALD WEALESD WEALES...

...The Kennedy connection seems almost peripheral to a second character, an embodiment of the hopes and losses of young Americans in the 1960s-until her final speech...

...They talk directly to the audience or occasionally to a non-existent other character, but never to one another...

...The play is both a product of that malaise and its chronicler...

...The fifth character, a Vietnam veteran hooked on heroin, Eastern mysticism and conspiracy theory, is a little more difficult to figure out...

...Wanda, a rather genteel, middle-class black woman, is the direct link with the Kennedy murder, the Kennedy myth...

...It may be that the character is black simply because Barbara Montgomery, who has performed in a number of Patrick plays off-off-Broadway, has been cast in the part, for there is no racial indication in her lines...

...The stereotypical conception of the characters and the monologue presentation of them tend to reduce them to demonstrations in an argument, at their best in satirical moments...

...THE STAGE Robert Patrick is one of the most prolific of the off-off-Broadway playwrights, but unlike Sam Shepard, say, or Lanford Wilson, he has been unable-at least, until Kennedy's Children-to reach much of an audience outside that local scene...

...Her story, a partly comic, partly pathetic history of the counterculture movement, ends as she quotes a screaming Robbie, still willing to fight for peace and love, if she will just tell him whom to kill, asking if she wants him to be Lee Harvey Oswald...

...Buffo is a barely fictionalized version of Joe Cino, whose Caffe Cino, the first of the play-producing coffee houses, was Robert Patrick's first theatrical home...

...Two other deaths are used as parallels to the murder of Kennedy...

...as played by Michael Sacks, he is a plainly demented young man who preaches lack of commitment as the road to peace and who indicates that he has killed his best friend and is willing to kill again for the cause...

...Although Kennedy's Children is an interesting attempt to trap the Zeitgeist in five representative characters, it has limitations, both ideational and technical...