The Ninth Street Center Ninth Street Center Journal

"Find Your Way Home"
by John Hopkins

reviewed by Paul Rosenfels

The play "Find Your Way Home" by John Hopkins, playing at the Biltmore Theater on Broadway, is a brilliant psychological statement of the problems of two homosexual lovers struggling to throw off the conventional social roles which society has assigned to them. One is Julian, 23 years old, who is in the midst of a degrading period of seduced homosexual promiscuity which began when his lover left him a year before. The other is Alan, 47 years old, who has decided at the time the play opens to return to Julian, although he has not informed his wife and two children of his decision to leave his marriage of 23 years. There are two other characters in the play who embody one form or another of banal conventionality. They are Jackie, Alan's wife, and Powell, a casual homosexual contact of Julian's, who uses homosexuality in a loveless and hedonistic fashion without the slightest regard for the human value of people.

This play is hard for some people to take. It makes reference to sexual acts in explicit and unvarnished language, and the problems of the characters are laid bare with an earthy and penetrating vision. It is about people in dire trouble, but their difficulties have universal quality, as befits a creative artistic statement. But because Julian and Alan are suffering a great deal, some people in the gay community think it depreciates the homosexual experience. This is a narrow viewpoint, taken by public relations minded people who fail to comprehend the psychological depth of the play. This play is about humanity itself, seen in a moment of agonistic reappraisal of the whole scope of previous existence. The fact that the play ends with Julian and Alan freely choosing to adhere to their homosexual relationship as their best chance for happiness is a clear indication of the positive quality of homosexuality for them. People who oppose a work of art because it does not present a prettified view of gay life are book burners at heart. Any issue of the Advocate supplies more material for downgrading homosexuality than can be found in this play.

The critics are floundering even worse than the gay public relations people in their attempt to evaluate this play. The truth is that their critical capacities are overwhelmed by this exposure to a world that is alien to any view of life which they have permitted themselves to have. Marilyn Stasio in Cue lost her psychological cool in her review, revealing her desperate need to put distance between herself and this unfamiliar material. She pontificates that the play's honest language is "too strong for these characters." I suppose it would sound more acceptable if spoken by cruder and less people, where street language could be more easily tolerated as evidence of an uncivilized condition. She states that the author has made Julian "a neurotic of morbidly delicate sensibility, prone to hysteric behavior that robs his character of its reality." Well, that's exactly what Julian is, but the critic fails to see that Julian is engaged in a tremendous struggle to deal with his morbidity, and this struggle embodies vivid reality for those who are not committed to the comfortable wuperficialities which protect so many people from alien information. She implies that the part of Jackie strains credibility because the "character . . . flips through a dozen high-intensity mood changes in as many minutes." Again, this is exactly what happens with people who are confronted with truth they have no way to deal with or accept. Jackie's oscillations have a desperate and pathetic quality which reaches the highest levels of the sense of tragedy. This is happening to a person who has built her life on a lie which now stands harshly exposed. All alternatives are revealed to be unsatisfactory. Alan is described as a boorish clod so lacking in human value that "nobody of any sex would want the ass." This view of Alan comes from the fact that an apparently adjusted father is now deserting his assigned post in society after a year of vacillation and weakness, and in the process his problems are showing. The goodness in Alan and the great need to overcome his selfishness through a genuine love for someone who needs him on an honest level escapes the clouded vision of the critic.

Why is it that the homosexual relation of Julian and Alan offers them their best chance to cleanse their lives of neurotic morbidity and immature selfishness? Julian needs to be loved. Alan needs to find responsibility built on a true and abiding devotion to the needs of another person. Each wants a partner who will help him in dealing with the central problem of his life. Julian pleads for continuity in love and devotion. He tells Alan, "I can't trust you, love. You went away. You said you wouldn't -- all the same, you did." Whenever Julian faces emotional emptiness he is flooded with an overintensity of feeling which goes nowhere but into masochistic reactions. He says "I hurt a lot, and I cried, after you left. I used to cry all the time. It got ridiculous." His sentimental hunger for feeling includes the sexual area, leading to seduced promiscuity in which he responds automatically to the sexual drives of others. In such a world, Julian rapidly loses his integrity and self-respect. It is through a relationship with Alan that he hopes to deal with his false submissiveness and gain a new sense of his own values. Alan, on the other hand, suffers from a false drive toward dominance. Alan is a victim of pseudo-masculinity, based on conventional images of a socially supported masculine role. Alan describes the evolution of the compulsive machismo trap in which he found himself. "And every day lies, deceit, pretense -- and endless little insincerities. I had affairs, pathetic cruel affairs. Women at first -- then girls. I always brought them presents -- and they didn't know I wasn't really there . . . There was excitement running from bed to bed, and yes, a sense of power . . . I played so many games with truth I lost all sense of honesty." And then again in talking to his wife, Jackie: "I haven't told the truth to anyone in 20 years. I live deceit and lies, as naturally as smiling." He describes himself as "someone selfish, knowing what he wanted, disregarding other people's pain . . . sustained by his stupidity and selfishness, his obstinacy, not looking any way but straight ahead, knowing if he looks around, he has to stop." It is very clear that Alan has come to the end of the line on this style of life.

It is not at all clear to Jackie that Alan is in the process of a major developmental change. She follows Alan to Julian's apartment, thinking she is uncovering the latest of his heterosexual affairs. On discovering Julian's existence, she heaps contempt on the homosexual experience, revealing that she has been successful in hiding from herself the homosexual aspect of her husband's nature, in spite of 23 years of close association. On discovering the two men together, Jackie says "You've been -- what you call it -- surely not! -- making love?" Later she says "one thing -- you don't seem queer." Alan tells her, "I should have left you long ago. I didn't have the strength, and yes, I was frightened." Jackie says, "You can't leave me. Don't you understand? 23 years! More than half my life. You belong to me." Alan answers, "I don't love you." Jackie replies, "You haven't loved me for 15 years. You stayed with me. What's so different now -- why do you have to love me?" Alan says, "I love him."

Alan believes that if he is to find his way out of his pretentious and self-aggrandizing superficialities and take the long road back to a sense of honesty and truth, he must be able to love in a deep and self-involving way. He feels he can no longer afford to employ the easy social supports which his role as a husband and father confer on him. This is not simply a rational choice, as Jackie urges him to make, but one impelled by inner suffering, depression, and self-hate. Julian is equally dissatisfied with his position in life. He finds himself an abused and helpless person, a victim of conventional social images of what it is to be generous, kind, and affectionate. His feminine qualities are sentimental and seduced, and do not ever lead to a meaningful relationship with others. His hunger to feel is a sucking whirlpool which grants no quarter and has no sense of justice. Once in the neighborhood of its magical powers, hi can do nothing but submit. All he is left with is rage.

As the play ends, Julian and Alan have made their choices. Whatever the obstacles and problems in the way, they will travel the next part of the road together. Considering the almost overwhelming nature of their developmental difficulties, this decision may seem rash and irrational, almost touched by madness. Or is it that they have gained access to the wellsprings of a genuine honesty and courage, which, once experienced, becomes an irreducible necessity for both? Is it that great purposes require great actions? Within an atmosphere often sordid and sometimes mundane, a resourceful and creative playwright, with the help of highly skilled actors, has made a human statement capable of penetrating the psychological fog in which most people choose to live, inviting the audience to become involved in the true idealism and morality of the human undertaking.

-- reprinted from The Ninth Street Center Journal 2, 1974