Unholy Flame

By T. E. Kalem

SOLOMON'S CHILD by Tom Dulack

A father has his son kidnaped and held under duress at his summer cottage in the Catskills. Strange? Yes and no.

Two years before the action begins, the boy, Shelley Solomon (Evan Handler), had quit his pre-med studies to join the cult of the Unified Congregation. From a temple of that cult, Shelley has vituperatively proclaimed that his divorced "earth parents" are dead and that "I am fed by the flame of the Holy Essence."

Convinced that his son has been brainwashed, programmed like a computer, the distraught father Allan (John McMartin) hires a deprogrammer to restore Shelley to his precult self. The duel of wits, will and passion between the boy and the deprogrammer, Balthazar (Anthony Zerbe), forms the core of this eruptively theatrical play. Echoes of Equus resound--of the boy who blinded horses he took to be gods, of the psychiatrist who cured him.

This Balthazar (symbolically named for one of the Magi) is an ambiguous wise man. He has been a phony evangelist who muleted gullible believers, a sly fox in the vineyards of the Lord. Precisely because he has dabbled in the devil's art, he can cite Scripture, incandescently, to cast out the devils who possess Shelley.

Dramatist Dulack also fashions a flirtatious scene between Balthazar and Allan's ex-wife Liz (Joanna Merlin) and invents a hilarious kook's kook (Deborah Hedwall). The ethics of deprogramming do not trouble Dulack, as perhaps they should.

--By T.E. Kalem

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