ANGELS
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Stuart Allen is author, director, and star of Angels–and, according to his publicity, an “HIV-positive recovering crack addict.” While this may render his credibility unimpeachable, it does not automatically render his writing flawless. The journey to mend Doris’s and Allan’s broken hearts offers too many side trips poking fun at easy, overworked targets: new-age mystics, exploitive bosses, homophobic fundamentalists (whose pious declarations reveal a secret craving for sodomy), and assorted authority figures. All of them are presented as comic grotesques–the hospital nurses and an unemployment counselor Doris consults are all fat females, and a bored angel in leopard-skin crown disses the human race like a weary baby-sitter: “You people can’t be left by yourselves for a minute!”
Being HIV-positive does not necessarily render junkies and neurotics attractive, either. As we move into the second hour of listening to Doris spew hostility and Allan self-pity, their deliberate vulgarity and the sanctimonious egocentricity that motivates it become irritating. Allan is given to remarks like “I blow my nose and my snot comes back at me!” and casually refers to women as “fish.” Doris introduces herself to him with an anecdote about butter as a rectal lubricant and later achieves satori while shopping for hemorrhoid medication. These repugnant images are flung in our faces with a curious ingenuousness, as if these two were children bent on demonstrating what dirty little brats they can be. If ever there was a play to debunk the notion that imminent death transforms misanthropic mediocrities into saints, this is it.
