PATIENT A
Nomenil
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Blessing’s play, already five years behind the times when it premiered in 1993, attempts to “delve further into the great mystery of AIDS,” as New York Newsday claimed (maybe the Bergalis family commissioned the review as well). But the play simply pays lip service to the larger issues the epidemic raises: the media’s beatification of “innocent victims” such as Ryan White, Arthur Ashe, and Bergalis and its virtual disregard for tens of thousands of “untouchables” who suffered similar fates; the need for sound public health policy in the face of hysteria; the second epidemic of hatred and intolerance that follows in the medical plague’s wake. Mostly Patient A is yet another public forum for polishing Kimberly Bergalis’s halo.
Most of the play is a monologue, Bergalis telling her life story as artlessly as a People magazine article and maintaining heroic strength while even her father sobs on her shoulder. Blessing attempts to add a counterpoint to her story by creating the nebulous and dramatically inconsistent character of Matthew, a “composite of the thousands of gay men who have suffered in the AIDS epidemic,” as the back of the published script condescendingly puts it. At best Matthew interjects occasional politically correct sound bites that punch holes in Bergalis’s self-absorption. At worst he seems decorative, used to “vary the presentation,” in Blessing’s words. As a result, it is always Bergalis who matters. Blessing participates in the very kind of unfair media play he hopes to condemn.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jim Alexander Newberry.
