Twenty-five years after Chicago’s first sparsely attended, little-noticed gay-pride parade celebrating the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots, June has turned into a monthlong festival of gay and lesbian awareness–and nowhere more than in the theater scene, whose support of gay material has been strengthened rather than weakened by the AIDS epidemic and its political fallout. Troupes that program gay material year-round, like Bailiwick Repertory and Zebra Crossing, mount special pride series, while other companies (including some formed for one-time efforts) trot out a slew of plays about coming out, dealing with parents, fighting AIDS, etc. Three Tall Women, Jest a Second!, Patient A, Lesbian Bathhouse, Jerker, the gay-pride edition of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind–the list goes on and on. Even the month’s big road-show musical, Kiss of the Spider Woman, was a gay love story; even Second City did its first-ever gay-pride show last week.
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The play’s perverse protagonists epitomize two of the most perplexing types to emerge during the AIDS epidemic: the married closet cases who eschew safe-sex precautions and so bring the virus home to their families, and the promiscuous Gen-Xers who came of age surrounded by the disease but seem oblivious to it. Bob is a middle-aged Manhattanite whose wife has left him to die alone; a failed writer and actor, he sponges off his businessman brother (who lives somewhere in the midwest) while alternately reminiscing about and sneering at his own squandered potential in literature (his main talent was imitating writers like Hemingway and James) and drama (he’s especially proud of his darkly revisionist Harvey, which emphasized the hero’s alcoholism). Unexpectedly intruding on Bob’s isolation is his brother’s boy Josh, a grungy college dropout with a Tim McVeigh crew cut and a history of self-destructive recklessness. Angry that his “married faggot” uncle “took it up the ass,” Josh insists that the thought of gay sex “makes me retch”–likely evidence of his own latent homosexuality. Yet he never acknowledges it even at the play’s improbable climax, when he offers his sexual companionship to the uncle he knows has lusted for him since childhood–deliberately inviting HIV infection as part of the deal.
But the problem with Uncle Bob is one of dramatic credibility, not political correctness. Whatever positive implications the script might convey are fatally compromised by its manipulative structure and its reduction of illness to a playwright’s conceit. Actor-author Austin Pendleton’s bitchy, literate script is packed with razor-sharp barbs worthy of early-60s Edward Albee. But while its viciously cutting gallows humor produces considerable laughter–until the increasingly repellent plot sacrifices the audience’s sympathy–the verbal sparring never seems like the spontaneous interaction of two real people. Similarly calculated are the escalating explosions of physical violence: this is the kind of play where, when a character enters carrying a porcelain coffee cup, you know he’ll smash it in anger–then cut himself sweeping up the pieces, the better to show off some stage blood.
