The Town of Babylon

DEBUT In this distinctive, multilayered debut, Andrés, a professor of public health, returns to his working-class hometown to tend to his ailing father and finds himself reluctantly attending attends his 20th high school reunion. There, he’s reunited with key people in his life, including first love Jeremy; learns that his valiant close friend Simone is in a psychiatric hospital; and faces the bullying Paul, now a Christian minister, whom he challenges for having beaten a gay man in high school even as he has the generosity to consider that Paul was compensating for his own sense of inadequacy. Andrés is in town without his husband, whose infidelity he has just discovered, and while there he has a liaison with Jeremy, now married to a woman. But he’s out of place here, angry at the values he sees around him and how much things haven’t changed. He is an exceptional character, astute, accomplished, and able to articulate his frustrations.