A Common Bond of Suffering

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Plays with political agendas have largely passed out of fashion. Revivals of work by such impassioned advocates as Ibsen and Arthur Miller are often met with weary resistance, and few contemporary writers seek to emulate their manifestos. On one subject, however, the theater is ablaze with social concern: the deadly viral disease known as AIDS, which as of last week had claimed 4,906 lives and is worsening. At least seven productions around the country have dealt with its impact, particularly on the major risk group, male homosexuals. Actors from coast to coast have performed Jeff Hagedorn's monologue One, which begins, "I have acquired a disease that means I am going to die." In 1984 Atlanta's Seven Stages Theater produced Warren, a portrait of a victim, which later played in San Francisco and Hawaii; also in San Francisco, the long-running The aids Show surveys the effects of the disease on the whole gay community.

In New York City, two tense and touching works are running simultaneously: Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, a tirade at the supposed inaction of government, the press and even the potential victims, is off-Broadway at the Public Theater; William Hoffman's As Is, depicting one male couple's ordeal, opened last week on Broadway.

All of these AIDS plays reach out to heterosexuals, both for help in combatting the disease and to warn that it is spreading into the "straight" population. The authors also wrestle with basic questions of the sexual revolution: Is it liberating to be a libertine? Does promiscuity debase the spirit? How does one balance momentary, if intense, pleasure against sustaining a lifelong commitment? Is happy monogamy the ideal state of man? But Kramer and Hoffman are dramatists as much as propagandists. What makes As Is and Normal Heart so deeply affecting is that they portray anguish and doom in individual human terms and enable audiences of every sexual inclination to grasp a common bond of suffering and mortality. Oddly, yet persuasively on the stage, both plays are also very funny.

Normal Heart reviews the unfolding of the epidemic through the eyes of a querulous but sincerely righteous gay activist. Audience members may feel inclined to tune out during the protracted debate over the direction of gay political movements, and Playwright Kramer belabors his belief that the proper response to AIDS is universal sexual abstinence, at least among gays. But he captures the panic and self-hatred that AIDS has unleashed. He dishes up highly imaginative invective, not least toward a character based upon himself. And he creates a complex, interesting romance between his surrogate, played by Brad Davis (who starred in the film Midnight Express), and a New York Times fashion reporter, portrayed with appealing directness and believability by D.W. Moffett. The reporter, who contracts AIDS, speaks the focal line: "There is not a good word to be said for anybody's behavior in this whole mess."

As Is deals with politics more obliquely. Where Kramer screams in outrage at the madness of promiscuity, Hoffman laughs at the self-delusion and hypocrisy of it. His play, told in montage style, juxtaposes reveries by the ingratiating central couple--for example, about the pleasures of "nondirective, noncommitted, nonauthoritarian" sex--with satiric snippets depicting how that rhetoric translates into the raunch and squalor of an anonymous sexual underworld. The supporting cast all play multiple roles; Ken Kliban and Lily Knight are especially effective as an AIDS victim's estranged straight brother and tolerant chum. Hoffman has written rich, lyric dialogue for the leads: a budding writer (Jonathan Hogan) who is diagnosed as having the disease, and a former lover (Jonathan Hadary) who takes him back "as is" to nurse him. During the play's earlier off-Broadway run, Hadary played the lover as a near saint, but has now toned down the sanctimony and emphasizes the character's wit. Hogan must storm through the show on a single note approaching hysteria. Yet he manages to find great variety, shading and humor in the role, and delivers the most powerful performance of the Broadway season.