‘AS IS’ SOOTHES SOME OF THE AIDS SUFFERING : Warts and All, It’s a Tough, Ironic, Profoundly Serious Treatment

The greatest danger in the writing of plays about terminal diseases is sentimentality. When it comes to AIDS, the volatility of the issue only accentuates the danger.

Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” does not entirely escape the emotional trap, but William M. Hoffman’s “As Is” comes as is--warts and all. It’s a tough, ironic, profoundly serious treatment of the subject.

The pleasant surprise in the edition that airs on Showtime cable (Sunday and Thursday, 9 p.m.) is how well the play’s malleable use of space and time adapts to so earthbound and realistic a medium as television.

Credit director Michael Lindsay-Hogg for much of the success of the transfer. He uses the camera artfully to investigate what has tragically become a common tale: the reunion of ex-lovers when one of them has come down with AIDS.

Rich (Robert Carradine) is the victim here. When his former lover Saul (Jonathan Hadary, as a real Jewish mother) finds out that Rich is fatally afflicted, he wants only to be allowed to care for him.

Rich, however, wants nothing to do with Saul. Freaked as he is, he pursues promiscuity with renewed vengeance, aggressively haunting the bars (including a hilarious scene in a leather bar), angrily getting even as he spreads his rage among the unsuspecting in a frenzied consumption of inward fury and outer disregard.

That is not the most attractive of enterprises, and Carradine injects the right mix of venom and vulnerability in a richly impertinent performance. We get him as is, human in all his failings. As he weakens and allows Saul back into his life, the two achieve more than reunification, finding an epiphany of sorts in the new terminal dependency.

Hoffman’s skill is in presenting all this fairly raw, introducing a host of meaningless well-meaning friends and providing a Greek chorus in the form of a self-derisive hospice worker (an ideally cast Colleen Dewhurst who knows how to milk every drop from the play’s best and most bitter lines). Her monologues to the audience, serving as bookends to the play, chillingly illuminate the argument.

Ultimately, though, it is Hadary’s award-winning performance that stays with us. Complex and vivid, he paints a portrait of Saul that is at once annoying and appealing in its hypersensitive nakedness, irresistible and irritating in its devotion.

He is the only artist held over from the stage production, conspiring with the rest to make “As Is” one of the strongest entries in “Broadway on Showtime’s” growing lineup of plays reproduced for television.