Reading The Boys Next Door, I kept wondering if it was okay to laugh. Some scenes walked the line carefully and made me wonder if laughing would entail laughing at the “boys” because of their handicaps, or laughing with them because of humorous moments they had, as people with disabilities.

I found myself so amused when Barry went into his pro golf, but that seemed less amusing when he was talking to his abusive father; I was laughing when Arnold was threatening to move to Russia, but immediately felt guilty.

The whole play I walked this line, although I got comfortable. Then, near the end, Tom Griffin hit me straight in the heart with the line, by Lucien (in this breaking-the-fourth-wall lucidity). “I stand before you a middle-aged man in an uncomfortable suit, a man whose capacity for rational thought is somewhere between a five-year-old and an oyster. (pause) I am retarded. I am damaged. I am sick inside from so many years of confusion, utter and profound confusion. I am mystified by faucets and radios and elevators and newspapers and popular songs. I cannot always remember the names of my parents. But I will not go away. And I will not wither because the cage is too small. I am here to remind the speices.. of.. the species. I am Lucien Percival Smith. And without me, without my shattered crippled brain, you will never again be frightened by what you might have become. Or indeed, by what your future might make you.”

Is that true? It certainly sounds profound. Do the damaged among us – anyone who is less than fully whole – make us uncomfortable because w e know but for luck or the genetic lottery or grace of God, we could be like that? The handicapped are less than functional; they are not less than human, and this play was so … humanizing; giving them humor and heartbreak and silly little dates where they sat on couches and talked about keys.

I think that this play goes out of its way to create not sympathy, but empathy for our fellow man who is a bit (or a whole lot) different from what we have come to expect as the norm. Even the title ‘The Boys Next Door,’ places them not far away, but as people who could literally live down the street, who could work in our mom and pop corner stores, frequent our libraries.

This play made me uncomfortable, made me see the ugliness inside of people; inside of me. (The heart is deceitful above all things and no man can contest.) It was like looking into a mirror and seeing how ugly people are, in the same way that Lord of the Flies does, but it also was very, very beautiful and touching.