If you are (like I was until last week) unfamiliar with Jonathan Tolins’ Twilight of the Golds, the main conflict of the story is a woman who contemplates terminating a wanted pregnancy after finding out via experimental in-utero DNA testing that her baby is 90% likely to turn out gay – shocking and offending her gay brother David, as well as any millennials in the audience.

I found out later that Twilight of the Golds premiered in 1993, the same year Tony Kushner’s epic Angels in America hit Broadway and Philadelphia hit movie theaters. The AIDS crisis in America was at its peak. Princess Di was running around the world holding hands with AIDS patients. So yeah, in the 90s, expectant parents watching the AIDS crisis happen might have reservations about bringing a gay child into that crisis. But to an audience in 2024, that idea is foreign and off-putting. How could a family that refers to themselves as “liberal” throughout the script even have this conversation? It’s probably privileged of me to say that this show is dated and shocking more than it is thought-provoking. But isn’t it great that my generation is privileged enough to find it shocking?

Abortion isn’t the only subject of the play. Tolins also hits on opera (over and over), on family interdependencies, parental approval and lack thereof, on the questionable morality of DNA testing bordering on eugenics. For most of the first act, truly, those seem to be the main points. David continuously compares the downfall of his family to the plot of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, which is an interesting analogy, even though it doesn’t really fit. Unfortunately, these ideas all sort of fall by the wayside as the audience gets swept up in the Bigger Debate.

Maybe the twist of this plot would not have been as shocking had the production design done more to warn me this is the nineties! from the start. There are a few clues in the script that maybe should have been obvious: Suzanne Gold-Stein (Lindsay M. Palinsky) has a monologue in the first act that makes pop culture jokes that went entirely over my head, and David Gold (Jim Lindsay) references attending multiple friends’ funerals, presumably HIV/AIDS related. But there was nothing visually to confirm that this production is set in the 90’s. All costumes were decidedly modern. Set design and dressing were bland, incoherent, and could be early 2000s, at best. This show should be a period piece, if it is done at all – the fact that it isn’t makes its subject matter difficult to overcome.

The set design is odd in ways unrelated to its timeliness. The space at Genesis Creative Collective is very deep, but the actors perform on the ground in front of the stage, with audience on three sides. The raised stage is curtained off halfway back (to serve as a backstage area) and the front part is dressed with a huge projector screen. Unfortunately, because I had to sit on the side of the stage, I could not focus on both the actors and the screen at the same time. My husband told me later that the images on the screen changed often throughout the show; I was none the wiser. I don’t usually see the point in on-stage projections, but they remain popular (four of the plays I have seen since November have featured projections) for reasons unknown to me.

Despite my issues with the script and set, I found the acting for the most part admirable. Rick Felkins as Walter Gold, Suzanne and David’s father, is adorable when he is loving and heartbreaking when he is hateful (during an argument, he tells his son he thinks he is “diseased”). His wife Phyllis, played by Jan Phillips, is self-deprecating, self-absorbed, and can’t keep a secret for her life, but in an endearing Jewish-mother way, you know? The banter between Palinsky and Lindsay is charming. It’s really only Kirk Kelso, as Suzanne’s husband Rob Stein, who seems out of place – perhaps because of his accent, which is deeply Texan rather than New York Jewish (even though Rob notes he was raised Orthodox), or perhaps because his chemistry with Palinsky simply isn’t as strong as her chemistry with anyone else on stage. None of the characters are particularly likeable by the end of the play, except for maybe David, but it’s not the actors’ faults: Palinsky is truly distraught as she tries to reason with her husband and brother over what she should decide. It’s simply that her distress is, well, distressing to a modern audience.

The program is not entirely helpful in deciphering why City Theatre and director Andy Berkovsky chose this play, or what they hope the audience gleans from it. In fact, some of the messages are conflicting. The program includes no director’s note, but it does feature a half page write-up about composer Richard Wagner copied-and-pasted from “Men of the West”, a blog with the tagline “Patriarchal, Christian, Hard Right”. A page later, there is a very loose rendering of the well known “First they came for…” poem by Martin Niemöller. (For your reference, compare the poem as published by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust to the image as seen in the program.) Next to it, we see a graphic with the quote “No woman is required to build the world by destroying herself”. I understand this as a pro-choice statement, but its implications considering the story at hand (again, the story where a woman gets an abortion because she decides she isn’t strong enough to handle raising a gay child!) are questionable.

The Twilight of the Golds could be seen as a heady, tricky piece of work for actors, directors, and designers alike, if handled carefully, with attention to detail. Or, more practically, it could be shelved. It’s ambitious, and it shows off some local acting talent, but ultimately, this script’s additions to the discourse have been outpaced by time, culture, and medicinal advances. Thank God.

Photo: Andy Berkovsky/City Theatre on Facebook

The Twilight of the Golds runs through February 25, 2024 at the Genesis Creative Collective. For info and tickets, visit The City Theatre online.