THE WHITE PAPER
City Lit Theater Company at the Chicago Cultural Center
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Running through the book are such themes as the desire of a lover not only to possess but to actually become his beloved, the narcissistic and strangely mystical fascination with mirrors, and the preoccupation with illusion and disguise. Most important is the morbidly romantic linking of youth, beauty, love, and death. The hero’s first major (but unconsummated) love is for Dargelos, an insolent, charismatic, slightly brutal schoolmate who dies mysteriously. Later the hero has an affair with a youth called only H., whose bisexuality and rebelliousness prompt physical violence that the hero painfully regrets when H. dies of an unnamed illness. (The situation recalls Cocteau’s tempestuous relationship with the brilliant writer Raymond Radiguet, who was Cocteau’s lover from the time he was 16–and Cocteau was 30–until he died of typhoid four years later.)
Finally seeking redemption in heterosexuality, the hero becomes engaged to an old friend–then falls in love with her brother, who commits suicide when the menage gets too intense. Exhausted by life, the hero sentences himself to emotional “exile”–but he emphasizes that his failings are human, not monstrous; condemns society’s lack of understanding; and calls upon the next generation to live by the credo “Love must be reinvented.”
TORCH SONG TRILOGY
KKT Productions at Red Bones Theatre
