THE LIVING
Artists have always helped us see our world anew; we need such vision now more than ever. Fortunately some of our most perceptive and ingenious social critics–Douglas Crimp, Paula Treichler, and Simon Watney, to name but a few–continue to reframe the AIDS crisis, reimagining our contemporary world partly through their insights into history, showing how ideas of contagion, sexuality, immorality, and criminality have been intertwined in Western culture. Anthony Clarvoe, whose historical drama The Living is subtitled “a parable for our times,” enters this company like a toddler entering a marathon. He simply cannot keep pace.
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The Living draws upon firsthand accounts of London’s 1665 outbreak of the plague, as well as upon Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. But the plague offers only a tenuous parallel to AIDS. Bubonic plague was spread by infected rodents and their infected fleas–although 17th-century scientists believed it was spread through the air, by poisonous vapors–and was therefore almost uncontrollably contagious. So the draconian measures taken in the name of public health are frightening but understandable: during the Roman outbreak of plague nine years earlier, those people who violated quarantine were executed by firing squad, hung from public gallows, or in some cases literally torn apart. But AIDS is infectious rather than contagious, so calls for curtailing the civil rights of those infected are completely insupportable.
Even the most repellent social drama can achieve a certain success in the hands of sensitive, well-directed actors, as Elmore Pond Players’ recent production of Lee Blessing’s wholly unpleasant Patient A demonstrated. But unfortunately Interplay’s cast, under David Perkovich’s heavy-handed direction, seems to mistake hyperventilation for acting. Nearly everything in this production is big and breathy. Wide eyes and trembling hands abound. As a result, there’s hardly a real emotion anywhere. The acting is especially troubling considering that the situation these characters face, helplessly watching their ranks thin, recalls the toll AIDS has taken. Why these actors feel the need to travel so far outside themselves to find these characters is beyond me.
