An attempt to salvage Monette's doomed 'summer'

JOHN YI/YH Daniel Squadron, CC'02, as an unstable artist, demonstrates to Ross Wachsmas, ES '02 how he went off his gourd.

It had been waiting in Los Angeles for years, tucked away and neatly forgotten in the UCLA archives. Paul Monette, JE '67, had begun to write Just the Summers in 1981, 14 years after he graduated from Yale and four years before he found out his lover, Roger Horowitz, had AIDS. He had planned to produce the play, and was working on the third draft when he, too, got his death notice in 1985. He stopped with this version of the play—the one Mollie Goldstein, PC '02, has rescued for its first public outing, in the Timothy Dwight dining hall—and began to write the two books, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir and Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, for which he is best known. His world and the society in which he lived had been irrevocably shattered. "AIDS is the great cleave in the world," Monette explained, "and nothing will ever be the same."

Just the Summers became the work of a dead man reborn in a vicious new light. "The difference between the first half of my career (the nice part) and the war work of AIDS," Monette said, "is like two sides of a chasm, with no rope bridge connecting." On the older side of the chasm of his disease, Monette left not only his earlier work, but also his innocence and youth. Monette's lifestyle and the general boy-meets-man premise of his play suggest homosexuality as the overarching theme of Just the Summers, but the play really turns on this question of innocence and youth—on that one last chance to reclaim optimism and an excitement for living.

The idea for the play arose out of Monette's six-week fling with a younger man named Joel in 1981. Monette's character, Julian Sutton (Joshua Kriegman, CC '02), is a 45 year-old married man who gets his kicks from his own dry wit and the eccentric artists he has allowed to live in his house. Joel is Tom Hawes (Ross Wachsman, ES '02), a 19 year-old kid who just dropped out of college to be a writer and to defy his father. In between the two men stands Roger's character (in female form), the surprisingly frank and understanding Annabelle Sutton (Vanessa Knutsen, TD '03). Julian takes Tom on as a mentoring project, but as Julian gradually grows obsessive about molding Tom, the play emerges as a vehicle for Monette's own guilt trip. He seems deeply apologetic towards Roger, but blames age, passion and confusion rather than himself.

Goldstein's production, like the apology and the play, seems incomplete—a work-in-progress rather than one with a fixed conclusion. One could blame Monette's third draft, on which the writer still included marks for change, but the actors themselves seem unsure of where they stand.

This young and perhaps inexperienced cast seems lost in Monette's script and the endless advice and life philosophies it spouts. The actors often speak stiffly with each other, talking as if by cue rather than in conversation. The move doesn't seem intentional—the silences are too long to smooth the dialogue, but too short to be profound. Kriegman and Wachsman break from the stiff mold when they interact closely—in heated intellectual debates and physical struggles—but quickly slip back into their old stilted selves. When they merely say their lines instead of communicating with one another—as they and the other actors often do—their passion and the confused decisions it provokes become hard to grasp.

Kriegman is admirably believable as a middle-aged man, but vacillates too much in his depiction of Julian's renewal, taking him up and down through emotions that prove incongruous with the certainty of Julian's ultimate actions. Wachsman fares a bit better; he brilliantly captures his character's youthful rebelliousness, but not quite the maturity to which he grows. Each effectively portrays moments in their characters' developments, but the journey from point to point is rather rough.

Of the supporting players, Daniel Squadron, CC '02, gives his character, a depressed painter who has lost the ability to paint on canvas (he paints on flowers and snow instead), a vibrancy that threatens to overpower every scene he's in. Knutsen as the uncomfortably tolerant Annabelle convincingly maintains her character's integrity as well.

But because we view this play in hindsight, already knowing the great change in Monette's life, its crises and upheavals seem trivial, like a small thundershower before Hurricane Hugo. "Does life always move this fast?" Tom asks Julian at the end of the play. "No, just the summers," Julian replies. If only this play could have stuck around for the beginning of storm season.

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