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Traitor to the Cause

by Terri Kasch, Grindstone Productions
review by Michael Scott Moore in SF Weekly March 16, 1999

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Traitor to the Cause, a new play by Terri Kasch, deals with a gay
New Yorker named Kieran whose apartment gets invaded by two
strange creatures: first, a homeless man who remembers him from
high school; then, the ghost of his sister, Sarah. Kieran has been
agonizing over a eulogy for Sarah, and it slowly emerges that
although she was nice and all, she didn’t know he was gay. In fact
she was part of the repressive provincial culture of his hometown,
Benedict Falls. The homeless man -- Jerry -- is openly gay, while
the well-off Kieran is out only to his New York circle of friends,
and plans to attend Sarah’s funeral at Benedict Falls with a phony
(lesbian) wife.

Kasch won an award from this paper for a 1997 script called
Verbatim, which dealt with language and identity, but I’m afraid
her new play trivializes the dilemma of being gay. For some reason
she handles her central event with frustrating coyness: At the start
of Act 2, Kieran is assaulted by a bunch of thugs and dragged
back into his apartment, bloodied and bruised. Who were the
thugs? Gay activists. Why did they do it? Apparently because he
was walking down the street with his “wife,” and because he’s
known to be gay but closeted. But we never get the whole story,
and for the entire second act a man with blood on his shirt rants
onstage while the audience wonders about that blood. The rest of
the story involves Kieran’s decision to come out to his sister’s
ghost. This is hard to take seriously, as well as being stilted, and
the stiltedness finds its way into the acting, so that only Carrie
Chantler, as Alice, and Andrew Kelsey, as Jerry, squeeze any life
from their lines. Traitor to the Cause is a bomb. It happens to the
best of us; but on vaudeville stages they used to have a big hook
for this kind of thing.

— Michael Scott Moore
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