The tortured affection that binds these men, articulated with complicated intensity by the superb actors John Glover (Anton) and Ron Rifkin (Sandy), is the most potent and provocative element in Mr. He "cauterized" his attraction to men, only to watch the life of propriety and comfort he had cultivated disintegrate when the floodgates stemming his true sexuality finally burst open again. Sandy married and prospered mightily in his father's banking business. He is addressing Sandy Sonnenberg, an old friend, briefly a lover, who chose another path. The speaker is Anton Kilgallen, a gay man departing middle age who has lived an open, scattered, satisfactory existence on the glamorous fringes of Manhattan society. The familiar words are spoken in sorrow and in love as much as in anger, not as a petty act of vengeance but as a final, fatal judgment on a misspent life. "I told you so." That evergreen taunt has a mournful sting in the final moments of Jon Robin Baitz's new play, "The Paris Letter," which opened last night at the Laura Pels Theater in a clean production from Doug Hughes, the Tony-winning director of "Doubt, a Parable," that can't disguise the play's tendency toward clutter.
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