TV Reviews : ‘Andre’s Mother’ Comes to Terms With AIDS

If it’s true that most dramas about homosexuals deal with coming out and dying, then it’s equally true that the best of these plays dramatize the obverse themes of healing and acceptance. That’s evocatively the case in playwright Terrence McNally’s “Andre’s Mother,” a pristine, almost elegiac “American Playhouse” production tonight at 10 on Channel 28.

The play, which McNally originally wrote as an eight-minute piece for the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York and then expanded to a still-brief 45-minute teleplay, is like a chamber concert that builds to a symphonic score. The production co-stars Richard Thomas as the surviving lover of an AIDS victim and Sada Thompson as the deceased’s “implacable” mother, who can’t deal with the knowledge that her son was homosexual.

We never see the victim because the story is not about him, nor is it about AIDS. It’s about the effect of an AIDS death on those left behind, particularly a mother who comes to New York for a memorial service for her son and, through flashbacks, moves from denial of her son’s homosexuality to a faint glimmer of acceptance.

Her ultimate confrontation with the anguished Thomas by a chilly pond in Central Park is a powerful scene and a charged, bare-knuckle moment for Thomas. As the pair alternately release white balloons symbolizing the freeing of the victim’s spirit, the play itself soars into a heeling realm that McNally and producer/director Deborah Reinisch have been calibrating all along.

Thompson’s stony mother, her eyes frosted like glazed buttons, delivers a steely performance, her silence plumbing the depths of denial, confusion and pain.

In counterpoint to Thompson is the lively Sylvia Sidney as Thompson’s crusty mother. Sidney is absolutely bracing, her performance slashed with sardonic wit and saber-rattling candor--check out her refreshing encounter in a restaurant with a gay waiter (Conan McCarty).

This is not a downer of a play but a variously colored work produced with a clarity that’s almost sunny.