STAGE REVIEW : ‘As Is’ Delivers Moving Portrait of Shock and Despair of AIDS

The fact that we are a world living with the threat of AIDS is, at last, a fact of our national theatrical consciousness.

On Broadway today, two of the hottest plays in town, both from the Seattle Repertory Theatre, deal with AIDS as a contemporary given: “Eastern Standard” and “The Heidi Chronicles.”

“Eastern Standard” even flirts briefly with a joke on what has now become the cliche of the stock gay character discovering he has AIDS. When a gay man complains that the worst thing he had ever imagined has happened to him, his straight friend gasps and then the gay man nods tragically: Yes, he has indeed lost his maid.

William M. Hoffman’s “As Is,” playing at the Lyceum Space through Feb. 25 is, in many ways, a throwback to an earlier era when the condition was so new that an entire play could be built around a character’s discovery that he has tested positive on the one exam everyone wants to fail.

Still, “As Is” is so elegantly and movingly done by San Diego StageWorks in its premiere production that it is impossible not to feel the shock, anger and despair of a story unfolding that by now, sadly, we all know too well.

At the heart of “As Is” is the loving relationship between Rich (Jeff Okey) and Saul (Barry Mann), which breaks off when Rich runs off with Chet (Rick Kunz) and resumes--at Saul’s insistence--when Saul discovers that Rich has AIDS.

The construction of the play echoes “The Shadow Box,” the touching story of terminal illness that tells of loss through a variety of vignettes and overlapping voices offering variations on the central stories.

The excellent ensemble cast, under the direction of Alan Craig DiBona, moves smoothly over a striking range of roles: leather-clad pickups at a gay bar, crisis-control phone operators, straight relatives, doctors, AIDS patients in a therapy group, individuals giving testimony to the dead.

Exceptional among these are Patricia DiMeo as a hospice worker making bittersweet jokes to get through the dying, Christopher Redo as Rich’s straight brother wrestling with his love for a sibling and his fear of infection, and Larry Baza as everything from a lonely heart in a gay bar to an AIDS patient with a refreshing facility for cutting through the crap.

Best of all, Okey as Rich never softens his characterization to beg our sympathy for his niceness. Rich is smart but difficult, charismatic but deeply angry that this blow has been dealt him; he lets the zingers fly and does not flinch when he sometimes draws the occasional blood even from those he loves.

Through the course of the story, we learn to love him on his terms, so that we can understand the sacrifices Saul is willing to make for him.

The production values reflect the care that underlines the entire production: the careful costuming by John-Bryan Davis, the subtle lighting by Joseph D. Naftel and the striking set by Marc Sanchez that tells a poignant story by itself: airy and modern, Sanchez’s design concludes with an exit framed by two ruined columns like a veritable gate to the other world. The broken pillars serve as a reminder not only of the ruined body Rich will be leaving behind, but of a more beautiful time when we all did not live under the threat of this disease like a modern sword of Damocles.

“AS IS”

By William M. Hoffman. Director is Alan Craig DiBona. Sets by March Sanchez. Costumes by John-Bryan Davis. Lighting by Joseph D. Naftel. Sound by Charles D. Craun. With Patricia DiMeo, Jeffrey K. Okey, Barry Mann, Rick Kunz, Julie Small, Christopher Redo, Larry Baza and Joseph Hulser. At 8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 19 and 2 p.m. Sundays Feb. 12 and 26 through Feb. 25. At the Lyceum Space, Horton Plaza, San Diego.