Kerouac's Last Call, a gritty tribute to the writer that opened Friday at the Old Court, traces Kerouac's last, whiskey-tinged night in New York before he reluctantly moves to Florida with his mother.
Playwright Patrick Fenton based his script on recordings of Kerouac's final conversations with friends at Gunther's Bar in Northport, Long Island. It's written with emotion and such attention to detail that the monologues are reminiscent of a Kerouac novel. The play comes to vivid life in the performances of members of Lowell's Image Theater, especially Jerry Bisantz as Kerouac.
Bisantz stumbles to the stage in character and remains a steadily buzzed, nostalgic and nervous Kerouac for the full hour-and-a-half. He stands close to the audience, so close that you can almost smell his booze-rattled breath.
Speaking directly to the audience, he feels like an old friend, telling stories of times past, laughing at his own jokes. At times, the words spill out with such speed that his mind seems to be working too fast for his mouth to catch up, a trait surely shared by the tormented Kerouac. Bisantz commands the stage in one whopper of a performance.
In Last Call, Kerouac revisits certain times and places in his life, from his glory days of traveling America with Neal Cassady, played by a powerful and convincing Steve O'Connor,
to the death of his brother at age 9. We learn of his daughter, Jan, who has met her father twice, at best, and wants to use his name as she sets out to write her first novel. We meet his parents, Leo and Memere Kerouac, a couple of strong-willed, French-Canadian drinkers with serious doubts about their son.Kerouac, proclaimed as the founder of the beat movement, finds himself at odds with the mood of the '60s. At a party he attends with Cassady, he's is insulted when the next-generation hipsters sit on the American flag. Horrified that they've credited his writing for their anti-establishment culture, he breaks down in anger and tears and predictably heads for the bottle. His longing for the America of his youth is the thread that runs through the play, as is the constant pressure to live up the expectations created by his seminal novel, On the Road.
In the montage that ends the play, the characters who have moved in and out of it explain how Kerouac died not long after his move to Florida, a victim of his vices. And in a final nod to Kerouac the writer, Bisantz returns to the stage as himself, and simply says, "Read his books."
