Subject: Theater: Dark Laughter Date: Published: 3/19/93 (111 lines) Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. LEISURE & ARTS -- Theater: Dark Laughter ---- By Melanie Kirkpatrick New York -- There used to be two kinds of shows in town, a local producer quipped recently, musicals and straight plays. Now there are three: musicals, straight plays and gay plays. Plays with gay themes are nothing new, of course, nor do they lack for audiences in a city that has just passed a domestic-partner law and whose Board of Education has put "Heather Has Two Mommies" and "Daddy's Roommate" on the reading list for first-graders. A decade ago, "La Cage aux Folles" reigned on Broadway and "Torch Song Trilogy" was celebrated off-Broadway. Since then, the onslaught of AIDS has inspired dozens of plays by such fine writers as Richard Greenberg, Terence McNally, Paula Vogel and Larry Kramer. While most have been unsuccessful, gooey with sentiment, they have been honest attempts to give voice to the tragedy of AIDS. This season, the most eagerly awaited show on Broadway is Part I of Tony Kushner's gay fantasy, "Angels in America." Off-Broadway, the hottest ticket is "Jeffrey" (Minetta Lane Theatre) by Paul Rudnick. Breaking with the somber tradition of AIDS plays, "Jeffrey" is a rollicking, ribald comedy about a gay man who is trying to give up sex. Even with AIDS lurking in the background, "Jeffrey" sparkles. As comedy, it's a huge success. It's when it gets serious that it fails. "I will find a substitute for sex," Jeffrey announces at the start of the play, "Sex-Lite. Sex Helper. I Can't Believe It's Not Sex." The conventions of comedy being what they are, temptation is thrown in his path in the guise of a hunk from the gym named Steve. The plot progresses along classic boy-meets-boy, boy-gets-boy lines. Along the way, Mr. Rudnick introduces a string of delicious characters, most especially Edward Hibbert as Jeffrey's swish, world-weary confidante, Sterling. As Darius, a pretty, empty-headed actor who likes to prance around in his "Cats" costume, Bryan Batt proves that "bimbo" can be a gender-free appellation. The cast is completed with three versatile actors and one actress who each play a half-dozen roles. Among them are a lascivious priest, an Italian guy who thinks he's a lesbian, and an apparition of Mother Teresa ("It's either Mother Teresa or a truly perverse drag queen"). Under the spirited direction of Christopher Ashley, "Jeffrey" frolics merrily from one scene to the next. Just as David Copperfield seems boring in comparison with the comic genius of Mr. Micawber, Aunt Betsey Trotwood and Peggotty, the eponymous Jeffrey is the uninteresting foil for Mr. Rudnick's supporting cast of mixed nuts. As played by John Michael Higgins, there's more than a touch of self-pity and moroseness about him. His job is to moon around the stage and let others make cracks at his expense. Lighten up, someone tells him, "Remember. Even Brecht wrote musicals." Wouldbe boyfriend Steve (Tom Hewitt) is likewise lackluster; just another well-tuned body turned out by a health club who could be played by any man with decent pecs. For the other characters, Mr. Rudnick, whose last show was the Broadway hit "I Hate Hamlet," has come up with some of the funniest lines and deftest gimmicks onstage today. The most hilarious is a sketch led by a society matron in cowgirl dress who is hosting a country-western fundraiser at the Waldorf. Looking like Barbara Bush in an Annie Oakley costume, she gushes about her "hoedown for AIDS." Mr. Rudnick is also a master of one-liners. Sterling identifies his live-in boyfriend as "a wonderful pet who can feed and walk itself." And in one of the few good lines allotted his hero, Mr. Rudnick has Jeffrey describe his job as a waiter for a catering company as like being in the "gay national guard." No one worried about the "queer" humor in "Jeffrey," because Mr. Rudnick so clearly speaks to a different audience (he might quip that he's preaching to the perverted). "Jeffrey" is an extremely funny play -- but it's also a disquieting one. For behind the hilarity is a profoundly disturbing expression of contemporary values. At one level, "Jeffrey" is a glorification of pre-AIDS days, when bathhouse became funhouse. In the play's moral universe, everyone worships at the altar of Eros. (Heterosexual parishioners outnumber homosexual parishioners at this church, of course.) "Jeffrey" does not question that ethos; instead, it mourns its decline. But the play contains an even more disquieting message. This screwball comedy is based on the extremely unfunny premise that Steve is HIV-positive. In pursuing Jeffrey -- not a man he knows and loves, mind you, but only someone he has ogled at the gym once or twice -- Steve is asking Jeffrey to risk his life. There is never any suggestion that Steve is selfish or to use an unfashionable word, wrong, to ask anyone to take such a risk. Nor is there any suggestion that Steve and Jeffrey might become friends, not lovers. Sex is apparently the only real way for them to connect. Mr. Rudnick would have us believe that Jeffrey, not Steve, is the one with the moral dilemma. "Fight AIDS, not life," he has a character tell a wavering Jeffrey. Jeffrey's decision to embrace Steve is presented as an act of moral courage. In 1842, Alexandre Dumas wrote a play with a plot like "Jeffrey's" about a similar moral and social problem. The heroine of "La Dame aux Camelias" is a prostitute dying of tuberculosis. The man she loves would be ostracized if their love were known. And so she pretends she no longer loves him and sends him away. The image of this dying woman coughing away her life surrounded by flowers became a lasting icon of romantic self-sacrifice for love and the moral good. Anyone who has seen the Dumas play, watched Greta Garbo play the deathbed scene in the film adaptation, "Camille," or heard Verdi's operatic version, "La Traviata," has seen how three geniuses of theater dealt with the tragic grandeur of a woman who puts the life of someone she loves above that of her own. But in "Jeffrey," Mr. Rudnick plays it just for laughs -- and self-indulgence. [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 from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]