Fearing the final stages of dying from AIDS, a recording artist (Erik Pearson) gathers his closest musical colleagues to record an album inspired by his experience living with a terminal illness. Unbeknownst to everyone except his audio engineer (Benjamin Baylon), he intends for the performance to serve as his own artistic epitaph, a final love note to his friends and romantic partner, recorded the night before he plans to take his own life.
If that sounds like a romanticized, perhaps macabre, fantasy, it’s not without good reason: Steve Schalchlin wrote this semiautobiographical 1997 musical as a therapeutic exercise during his own frightening period of declining health; he himself had been been diagnosed with AIDS during the tail end of the crisis. But in real life, Schalchlin received the deus ex machina that his onstage altar ego never did: after undergoing new and experimental treatment, Schlachlin’s viral load fell to undetectable levels, and he survives to this day. That extratextual information about its development entirely changes the soft, gauzy, tear-jerky, sometimes schlocky comedic and musical aesthetic that otherwise date the piece into something more hopeful and defiant.
With musical direction by Pearson, Darilyn Burtley, Liz Bollar, and Baylon provide powerful and emotionally bare voices, and in Christopher Pazdernik’s production for Refuge Theatre Project, the pop-gospel harmonies cut right down through the spine. In a contemporary production, though, there’s no getting around how the central conflict—a conservative southern Baptist infiltrating the session—results mostly in a lot of hand-holding and basic-level PSAs about LGBTQ people’s right to exist. v
Through 12/2: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 7 PM, Atlas Arts Media, 4809 N. Ravenswood, refugetheatre.com, $30.
