The Image Theatre – “They’ll never bore you!”
Kerouac’s Last Call by New York journalist and playwright Patrick Fenton was performed as a staged reading last night by Lowell’s Image Theatre. This was the first time the local group that specializes in producing work by local playwright’s has gone out of New England for a play, but given the subject of Fenton’s work and the current excitement surrounding Kerouac’s legacy and the coming to town of the scroll of On the Road, it seems more than fitting.
Stage set by local artist, Robert Bryan
Patrick Fenton, who was on hand to answer questions and share his thoughts and memories of Kerouac, started writing about Kerouac in 1964, when the author was really down. The fame of On the Road had died away, critics were dismissive of his talents and he had lost contact with the friends of his youth. He was living in Northport, Long Island with his mother and drinking at a bar called Gunther’s, which is where he held a farewell party for himself before moving to Florida. Someone made an audiotape of the evening which was the catalyst for Fenton’s play. Jerry Bisantz, founder of the Image Theatre, read the part of Kerouac, backed by actors playing characters from the author’s memory, including his parents, best friend Neal Cassady and daughter Jan. The playwright (and actor Bisantz) did a great job of catching Kerouac’s unique voice in some of the monologues, the way he could string words along rhythmically, riffing like a jazz musician or even as a kind of precursor to rap music. He also captured his end-of-life angst, the voices from his past, his ambivalence at being called “the king of the beats,” his ambivalence over his daughter and other relationships. The best line was when his father tries to get him to get a real job, asking him, “how many famous writers do you know from Lowell?” At the end, each of the back-up characters tells a bit about Kerouac’s life, ending with the playwright’s claim that Kerouac belongs with America’s greatest authors of this century, with F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway.
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