Sean Patrick Flanagan is a writer. He has been a journalist, a foreign correspondent and a war correspondent. He is a noted and respected author. He is also a Communist. But the year is 1951 and it is a bad time to be a Communist.

 

 

 

“The God at Twilight” is about heroes – the heroes we make and the heroes we tear down. And what we find at their core – no more and no less – is the human beings, with all their nobility and all their failings, that they always were.

 

 

The time is the present. The place is the State Mental Hospital. A homeless man is admitted suffering from a delusion. He claims to be the Son of God. As the play unfolds and the homeless man is examined by the Doctor, the unsettling possibility begins to arise that he might actually be exactly who he claims to be.

 

Two men, one a famous war correspondent, the other a condemned Nazi war criminal, meet again in shattered Berlin three years after the end of World War II to put to rest, once and for all, the ghosts that brought them together and tore them apart.

 

Someone much wiser than I once said that, for evil to triumph, it is only necessary for good men to do nothing. “Bookends” is a play about two good men who, in a time when evil was upon the land, responded to it in very different ways. Which was right? Which was wrong? Do we know…even today?