Robert Patrick, the prolific playwright and onetime roommate of Lanford Wilson best known for the drama Kennedy’s Children, which starred Shirley Knight in a Tony-winning performance, has died. He was 85.
Patrick died in his sleep Sunday at his home in Los Angeles, Jason Jenn, his caregiver and longtime friend and associate, announced.
Patrick got his start at the West Village off-off-Broadway venue Caffe Cino and worked at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, and more than 300 productions of his plays were staged in New York in the 1960s.
Patrick started writing Kennedy’s Children — set in a bar on New York’s Lower East Side on Valentine’s Day — in 1968 and finished it four years later. He premiered it off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizon to little attention before taking it to London, where it played in a pub and then the West End, was directed by Clive Donner and became a sensation.
“You can instantly see why it is a blockbuster here,” Clive Barnes wrote in September 1975 in The New York Times. “It has probably 17 things going for it, not the least Mr. Patrick’s uncanny ear for the way people talk and his equally uncanny ability to transmute that into the small yet totally convincing traffic of the stage.”
Kennedy’s Children bowed in November 1975 at the John Golden Theatre on Broadway and ran for 72 performances through January. For her performance as Carla, an alcoholic who sees herself as a successor to Marilyn Monroe, Knight received the lone Tony of her great career.
The son of migrant workers, Robert Patrick O’Connor was born on Sept. 27, 1937, in Kilgore, Texas. He joined the U.S. Air Force but was discharged after a poem he wrote to a fellow serviceman was discovered, then spent a summer as a dishwasher in Kennebunkport, Maine.
On his way back to his family in Roswell, New Mexico, Patrick stepped off a bus in New York in September 1961 and walked into Caffe Cino, then in rehearsal for a play. He remained in the city, taking on odd jobs to support himself while becoming involved in all aspects of theatrical production.
Inspired by future Pulitzer Prize winner Wilson, he wrote The Haunted Host, said to be one of the earliest modern gay plays, in 1964.
His résumé included Joyce Dynel, Salvation Army, Fog and Camera Obscura, which was produced on PBS and starred Marge Champion. In 1972, the Samuel French publishing company declared him “New York’s Most Produced Playwright.”
He wrote the book Untold Decades: Seven Comedies of Gay Romance, first published in 1988.
Patrick, who taught theater in high school, moved to Los Angeles in the early 1990s and briefly wrote reviews of adult films.
On his birthday in 2013, he performed a solo show about his career titled What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes a Great Story Later, which featured several of his original a cappella songs. This was followed by two more solo evenings of mostly song, Bob Capella and New Songs for Old Movies.
Patrick created a website with thousands of production photographs from hundreds of productions in New York and worldwide here. His theater archives rest with the New York Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center; portions have been digitized and are available online.
Survivors include his sister, Angela, aka Bunny.
