Subject: Theater: Stagey Stereotypes Date: Published: 06/13/97 (99 lines of text) Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. Theater: Stagey Stereotypes By Donald Lyons New York -- The gay ensemble play is by now a genre as formulaic as the Agatha Christie country-house mystery. Instead of the vicar, the countess, the doctor and the barrister weekending at the shady millionaire's rural seat, we get a group assembling for a party. The host is sweet, unloved and middle-aged; guests include the mean old queen, the dull "married" couple, the relatively straight outsider, and the muscular, moronic, much-lusted-after stud who has never heard of, say, Judy Garland. Obligatory activities are drinking and synchronized line-dancing. The pattern set by Mart Crowley's 1968 play "The Boys in the Band" has been faithfully followed in such American works as Terrence McNally's "Love! Valour! Compassion!" which updated the recipe for the 1990s with three parties, nudity and AIDS. Now arrives the English variant, Kevin Elyot's 1994 "My Night With Reg," at the Intar Theatre. Here too there are three gatherings, a party and two memorial get-togethers, which take place in the London garden apartment of copywriter Guy (Ron Bagden) in the 1980s. Guy is the sweet host, laboring since their college production of "Bacchae" under a crush on playboy John (Maxwell Caulfield). The waspish wit is Daniel (Edward Hibbert); the staid couple are Bernie (David Cale) and Benny (Joseph Siravo). The handsome stud, object of prolonged drooling, is the gardener (Sam Trammell). There's lots of liquor and reminiscence of a David Bowie concert, and a nude scene involving the gardener and the playboy -- all according to recipe. The big plot secret here is that, save for the host, all these men have had (most on the sly) sexual encounters with an unseen but allegedly charismatic person called Reg. Alas, though, the people we do see are as dimly realized and cliched as the one we don't. What must have gotten this unfunny, predictable and skimpy play its London raves is the way it manipulates the specter of AIDS. At the second gathering, we learn that Reg is dead; at the third one, it is the host himself who is being commemorated. Two other characters are not feeling well, and it is intimated that their dalliance with the phantom Reg will cost them their lives. Reg is AIDS. But this is dramaturgical gimmickry, rather like finding out in the last shot of a bad vampire movie that the one character we thought safe has fangs. If Mr. Elyot cannot create fresh characters in the first place, making them sick is no remedy. The familiar tropes of the script are not enlivened by the sluggish direction of Jack Hofsiss or the frantic playing of the inaccurately accented cast. Exceptions can be made for Mr. Caulfield, a smooth pro who was impressive a few years back in the infinitely superior Joe Orton farce "Entertaining Mr. Sloane," and tries gracefully to make sense of the underwritten playboy; and for Mr. Trammell, who almost makes a three-dimensional human being out of the gardener until he's forced into a humiliating and pointless nude scene. --- Pauline Kael once said that the visual, carnal medium of film is inherently hostile to religion, which exacts a focus on the unseen and the spiritual. The theater is more verbal than movies and hence less naturally resistant to ideas, but it must be admitted that religion is having a hard time on today's stages. Either its ministers are venal or its notions are oppressive. "Clean," a new play by Edwin Sanchez at the Atlantic Theater Company, while dealing with a Puerto Rican family in New York, centers on younger son Gustavito's relation with religion. First, though, the "family" that Mr. Sanchez has assembled: While ignoring the vast middle-ground of normality occupied by most real Puerto Rican families, he gives us every outre stereotype imaginable. The father is gruffly abusive; the stepmother is a seamstress with whom a drag queen falls in love while she's making him a wedding dress (you don't want to know); the older son is a macho bigot; young Gustavito falls madly in love, at the age of 13, with his local priest, who comes, tormentedly, to return the love. Mr. Sanchez cannot animate these lurid cartoons, however. The transvestite (Ron Butler, spectacularly miscast) is, for example, a mere aggregate of tired attitudes. It's the boy's obsession with the priest -- and the priest's with the boy -- that really grip Mr. Sanchez. But the playwright does not seem very familiar with the language or habits of Catholicism: Gustavito makes his "first confession" at 13; the priest speaks of "giving" Mass and "throwing in a little Latin." Sure enough, the priest, yielding to a passion for Gustavito at 15, decides that he'd been "faking it" and that he doesn't "want to be afraid anymore." More revealingly than he seems to be aware, Mr. Sanchez paints religion as an obstacle to the instant gratification of polymorphous hedonism. Of course, in Mr. Sanchez's eyes, such obstruction is a Bad Thing. Others might come away from his absurd play with a different moral. Postures like those of Mr. Sanchez have, it should be stressed, little in common with the principled, serious atheism of a Strindberg or an O'Neill or a Brecht; they're closer to the whiny petulance of a teenager told to have the car back at midnight. The artless stupidity of "Clean" is a bit mitigated by the impassioned playing of Victor Anthony as Gustavito and Nelson Vasquez as the older, rightfully suspicious brother. Director Neil Pepe has his actors, at key moments, almost freeze and speak starkly and simply; it's an interesting technique, clearly intended to cut the hysteria and melodrama. But it can't overcome the pernicious idiocies of "Clean." --- "Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde" has made the transition from the wide courtroom-like space of Greenwich House to the tighter, more dramatic Minetta Lane Theater with the aplomb of Oscar delivering an epigram. Moises Kaufman's dazzling, clever collage of actual texts is funnier and sadder than ever; the whole play has here a bolder theatricality and even more emotional impact. NS ART RVW RE NME NY US USE JN LNA DNS Arts & Entertainment; Reviews DRE North America; New York; United States; Eastern U.S. DJN Leisure & Arts [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.]