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The Twilight of the Golds
Parts for 3 men and 2 women. If your parents knew everything about you before you were born, would you be here? That is the question posed in this entertaining drama. All is well when Suzanne Gold and her close New York family discover that she is pregnant, until a prenatal test reveals that the baby will most likely be homosexual. The news forces the entire Gold family to confront issues of bigotry, evolution and the limits of love.
105 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
77 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 30, 2023
“Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
Killing me softly with his song…”
Norman Gimbel’s lyrics sum up my reactions to this play by J. Tolins. It didn’t help that the main character and I share the same first name. The play shows the parallels between the plot of Wagner’s “Ring Cycle” and the lives of the Gold family. The ends of both are devastating.
The movie did a terrible injustice to this script. READ the play!!!!!!!
Singing my life with his words
Killing me softly with his song…”
Norman Gimbel’s lyrics sum up my reactions to this play by J. Tolins. It didn’t help that the main character and I share the same first name. The play shows the parallels between the plot of Wagner’s “Ring Cycle” and the lives of the Gold family. The ends of both are devastating.
The movie did a terrible injustice to this script. READ the play!!!!!!!
October 23, 2022
"We know too damn much," observes Phyllis Gold midway through the second act of Jonathan Tolins's fascinating play The Twilight of the Golds. She is talking specifically about a recent (fictitious) breakthrough in the science of genetics that enables doctors to predict, with 90% certainty, that her pregnant daughter's unborn child will be homosexual. And Mrs. Gold wonders, in an intelligent, beautifully-written monologue, whether such a breakthrough truly constitutes progress.
This is the huge question at the heart of this funny, wise, maddening, important, frustrating play. The Twilight of the Golds considers a comfortable, fairly ordinary Jewish family living in present-day [1990s] Manhattan who are suddenly forced to confront an issue of earth-shaking significance. The fifty-something parents, Walter and Phyllis, are worldly, loving, and distinctly of their time; the children, Suzanne and David, are smart, spoiled, self-absorbed and slightly neurotic; all four are fundamentally good, caring people. Suzanne is a buyer for Bloomingdale's, David--who is gay--is a set designer for the Metropolitan Opera. When we meet the Golds, Suzanne and her husband Rob are celebrating their third wedding anniversary with the family. The evening ends with Suzanne's announcement that she is going to have a baby, and Rob's subsequent announcement that the biotechnology company he works for has developed a new genetic screening process that will enable them to acquire a great deal of data concerning what the child will be like. Rob and Suzanne try out the experimental procedure, and learn that their child--a boy--is "normal" in every way except that he is almost certainly going to be "like David." This news sets in motion a family crisis, with Suzanne and Rob considering aborting the baby, and David pleading for his unborn nephew's--and, as he says, his own-- life.
The Twilight of the Golds is occasionally political but mostly philosophical: it brings up more questions about family and society and love and tolerance than it can possibly answer. Therein lies the play's great weakness, by the way: it's done in by its author's ambitions. Especially damaging, to my mind, is the dangerous and explosive curve that the story takes midway through Act Two, when David confronts his family's latent homophobia. Suddenly, well-reasoned discourse is replaced by kneejerk melodrama: Twilight turns tragic, but this tragedy never feels inevitable.
The play's greatest strength is its characters, smartly drawn, three-dimensional people with whom it is hard not to sympathize. Mr. Tolins could, for example, have sketched the Jewish parents as stereotypes, but he doesn't: instead, they're sophisticated, genuinely funny and genuinely nice. When Suzanne protests as her brother is about to explain the plot of Wagner's Ring Cycle, her father tells her "You'll like it; it's about jewelry." Mrs. Gold, meanwhile, dryly observes that the reason that gay men are so good-looking is that they don't have any children.
I love this play because it has the courage to probe a fundamental moral issue. The Twilight of the Golds takes its title from Wagner's Gotterdamerung (Twilight of the Gods), and David tells us why: At the end of the Ring Cycle, the gods decree that everything must be destroyed so that a new world may be born that will hopefully be better than the last. Advances like the biotechnoloigcal marvel that Rob and Suzanne experiment with allow us, in effect, to play God. Will the world that we create be a better one or a worse one?
This is the huge question at the heart of this funny, wise, maddening, important, frustrating play. The Twilight of the Golds considers a comfortable, fairly ordinary Jewish family living in present-day [1990s] Manhattan who are suddenly forced to confront an issue of earth-shaking significance. The fifty-something parents, Walter and Phyllis, are worldly, loving, and distinctly of their time; the children, Suzanne and David, are smart, spoiled, self-absorbed and slightly neurotic; all four are fundamentally good, caring people. Suzanne is a buyer for Bloomingdale's, David--who is gay--is a set designer for the Metropolitan Opera. When we meet the Golds, Suzanne and her husband Rob are celebrating their third wedding anniversary with the family. The evening ends with Suzanne's announcement that she is going to have a baby, and Rob's subsequent announcement that the biotechnology company he works for has developed a new genetic screening process that will enable them to acquire a great deal of data concerning what the child will be like. Rob and Suzanne try out the experimental procedure, and learn that their child--a boy--is "normal" in every way except that he is almost certainly going to be "like David." This news sets in motion a family crisis, with Suzanne and Rob considering aborting the baby, and David pleading for his unborn nephew's--and, as he says, his own-- life.
The Twilight of the Golds is occasionally political but mostly philosophical: it brings up more questions about family and society and love and tolerance than it can possibly answer. Therein lies the play's great weakness, by the way: it's done in by its author's ambitions. Especially damaging, to my mind, is the dangerous and explosive curve that the story takes midway through Act Two, when David confronts his family's latent homophobia. Suddenly, well-reasoned discourse is replaced by kneejerk melodrama: Twilight turns tragic, but this tragedy never feels inevitable.
The play's greatest strength is its characters, smartly drawn, three-dimensional people with whom it is hard not to sympathize. Mr. Tolins could, for example, have sketched the Jewish parents as stereotypes, but he doesn't: instead, they're sophisticated, genuinely funny and genuinely nice. When Suzanne protests as her brother is about to explain the plot of Wagner's Ring Cycle, her father tells her "You'll like it; it's about jewelry." Mrs. Gold, meanwhile, dryly observes that the reason that gay men are so good-looking is that they don't have any children.
I love this play because it has the courage to probe a fundamental moral issue. The Twilight of the Golds takes its title from Wagner's Gotterdamerung (Twilight of the Gods), and David tells us why: At the end of the Ring Cycle, the gods decree that everything must be destroyed so that a new world may be born that will hopefully be better than the last. Advances like the biotechnoloigcal marvel that Rob and Suzanne experiment with allow us, in effect, to play God. Will the world that we create be a better one or a worse one?
February 12, 2024
The play hasn't aged well, and it's because things have progressed so rapidly in the LGTBQ+ and genitic science worlds. I can imagine some segments of our society terminating a pregnancy because the child might be gay, but not high income well educated jewish new yorkers. Then I started wondering if the whole thing is a metaphor for something else entirely, and it's not a LGTBQ+ play at all.
June 9, 2015
If your parents knew everything about you before you were born, would you be here? That is the question posed in this entertaining drama. All is well when Suzanne Gold and her close New York family discover that she is pregnant, until a prenatal test reveals that the baby will most likely be homosexual. The news forces the entire Gold family to confront issues of bigotry, evolution and the limits of love.
May 10, 2016
Interesting - did not see movie that was based on this play. Can see why it would have been controversial subject matter.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews