Subject: Pintauro Play Based on AIDS Support Group
Date: Published: 1/10/92 (52 lines)
Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

    LEISURE & ARTS:
    Theater:  Revolutionary Tales
    ----
    By Melanie Kirkpatrick

[91 lines irrelevant to AIDS removed.  -- sysop]

    Joe Pintauro's one-act drama "Raft of the Medusa" bears a
 structural similarity to act two of "Mad Forest."  Eleven
 characters confess their separate versions of a shared
 experience.  But that's where the similarity ends.  The setting
 is a New York City support group.  The time is now.  And the
 experience these men and women share is AIDS.  
    "Raft's" main problem is one of focus.  Mr. Pintauro tries
 to accomplish too much in just 90 minutes.  He has given
 detailed and melodramatic personal stories to each of the 11
 characters, plus a psychiatrist and a dead man, who appears
 in flashbacks.  It's hard to keep people straight, much less
 fully digest what they say.  Once you figure out who's who,
 though, there are some interesting and occasionally moving
 moments.  Mr. Pintauro has wisely avoided placing a saint or a
 stoic in their midst.  The fact that no one is particularly
 likable makes their stories stronger.  Only one character -- a
 mute street sleeper and drug addict -- is entirely
 unbelievable.
    AIDS has struck the theatrical community hard, and there
 have been a number of plays about AIDS in recent years.  None
 that I can recall examines the subject as thoroughly as "Raft
 of the Medusa" or is as intellectually honest.  Mr. Pintauro
 presents a variety of attitudes, popular and not, about the
 disease.  There are even hints that one or two of the
 characters may regret the behavior that led to their being
 infected.  The psychiatrist who leads the support group is
 wracked by guilt that he encouraged a now-dead homosexual man
 to be promiscuous.
    The play's title comes from an 1819 painting that depicts
 the survivors of the shipwrecked frigate Medusa.  They are
 waving to something on the horizon.  It could be land.  It
 could be the remains of their sunken ship.  It could be
 another ship coming toward them.  It is impossible to tell if
 a rescuer notices them.  There may not be a rescuer for AIDS
 victims on the horizon yet, but it is impossible to see Mr. 
 Pintauro's "Raft" and not notice, with perhaps more
 compassion, those who suffer from AIDS.  

[This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the
 personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the
 hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering
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