THEATER REVIEW : ‘Lives on the Line’ Sincere About AIDS

“Lives on the Line: A Docudrama in Seven Activists” at the Celebration Theater in Hollywood is one of those shows that allows little quarter for criticism.

Created by Ken Hanes and Jason Jacobs through a series of workshops funded in part by the City of Los Angeles’ Cultural Affairs Department, it is performed by actors and non-actors. The non-actors are real-life AIDS activists. Good Guys. The tone of the docudrama is lofty. It is documentary that aspires to poetry. The movement is stylized to emulate something of a cross between theater and dance.

The aim is to raise consciousness about AIDS. The effect is that of a deeply serious love-in.

Does anyone have a quarrel with this? No quarrel. But it isn’t particularly dynamic theater. One might argue that it isn’t theater at all, unless you take the term to its broadest definition. Yes, there are men and women talking, singing and moving on that stage and what they have to say--to each other and to the audience--is both therapeutic and significant.

But the very format imposes a kind of pseudo-naivete and earnestness that can be admirable, but also sentimental and tinged with unintended self-importance. The truths that get spoken here, mostly about callous heterosexual attitudes and insults and injuries suffered from growing up gay, are self-pitying and self-evident. They primarily satisfy an audience of the already persuaded hungering for justification.

Activism is generally too bald a force for theater, which thrives best on indirection and abstraction. Politics and art get at the same things but by very different routes. Even political theater has to be, paradoxically, both more subtle and more explosive than this presentation if it is to make a mark.

Also more fresh. The lighting of candles is an overused device. The creation of a human machine (actors as meshing cogs in mechanical movement) is an old theatrical trick. And the verbal revelations, when they come, are most often unsurprising (“My father was Archie Bunker: sports fanatic and an alcoholic,” “Some Christians are absolutely godless”) or redundant (“Sooner or later our eyes are permanently opened and we can’t close them again”). The activists here--Stephanie A. Boggs, John J. Duran, Wade Richards, Corey Roskin, Kim Singh and Tony Zimbardi (Deborah Eli was replaced by actress LaTonya Welch at the performance seen)--are guilty of nothing so much as good behavior. Their participation in “Lives on the Line” is more ardent than it is artful, and ably supported, within the limitations of the format, by actors Loretta Palazzo, Robert Slacum, Dean Testerman and Cece Tsou.

However, one cannot get away from the absence of disagreement in the piece. Reminiscence of pain and pervasive comity preclude conflict, which is what theater eats for breakfast. Everyone on that stage is asking for and offering unconditional acceptance.

To unconditionally accept “Lives on the Line” may be the best policy. It has elements of feel-good therapy, of self-assertive activism and something that passes for theater. It is sincere, a little dull and otherwise best left undefined.

* “Lives on the Line: A Docudrama in Seven Activists,” Celebration Theatre, 7051-B Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Saturday-Sunday, March 6-7, 13-14, 2 p.m. Ends March 14. $10; (213) 660-8587. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.