When the AIDS epidemic became a seemingly inescapable menace to gay men in
the early 1980s, lovers Oscar and Dennis fled New York City for their
vacation home on the Florida gulf coast, imagining the storm would soon
blow over. Three decades later they’re still there, clutching their way
through what may be the despairing final gasps of their self-imposed exile,
with only the blinkered good nature of their young, hunky, live-in handyman
Ford Angel to inject a bit of life into the sepulchral manse—which has been
freshly ravaged by a more literal kind of storm. Into the mix wanders
Norman, a long-lost member of their 1970s gay inner circle. His arrival
sparks long-buried resentments as well as a few unlikely seeds of hope for
a bearable future.
The story all but invites a Tennessee Williamsesque metaphorical
oversaturation, a pitfall New York playwright Kevin Brofsky admirably
avoids. And like Williams, Brofsky is largely concerned with his characters
and their relationships—to one another and, perhaps more centrally, to
their romanticized and obliterated pasts—rather than forwarding a plot.
Given the underrehearsed feel of director Paul Cook’s world-premiere
staging for Pride Films and Plays, it’s difficult to gauge Brofsky’s
success; while the script’s broad contours are solidly in place, the
interpersonal nuances that might give the production a fuller dimension are
largely absent.
Everyone’s past ends up erased, of course. Brofsky reminds us just how
harrowing that experience has been for the Reagan-era gay men who survived. v
Through 8/26: Wed and Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 PM, Sun 5 PM, Pride Films and Plays, 4139 N. Broadway, 866-811-4111, pridefilmsandplays.com, $25-$30, students, seniors, and military $20.
