COVER STORY : The Theater Fights Back : ‘Angels in America’ and ‘Falsettos’ are just two of an increasing number of works about AIDS. Twelve years into the epidemic, their impact--on the arts and America--marks a portentous moment for the American stage

In Act III of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” chairs are scattered about a bare stage, representing a hilltop graveyard. Actors playing the town’s dead are seated, quiet and still, in these seats.

As Emily, a young woman who has died in childbirth, settles into her resting spot, she finds her husband, George, sobbing uncontrollably at her grave.

“They don’t understand very much, do they?” she asks her mother-in-law, Mrs. Gibbs, who is buried nearby. “No, dear, not very much,” comes the reply. And on that note, the play comes to an end.

Wilder’s perennial slice of Americana tracks life, love and mortality in 1901-13 Grover’s Corners, N.H., but it could be Anytown, U.S.A. Or any kind of community.

For Grover’s Corners, substitute the American theater. In the place of Mrs. Gibbs, Emily and the townspeople, imagine countless actors, directors, writers, producers, designers and others. The difference is that in the “Our Town” of today’s theater world, the third act’s chairs are too numerous to count.

Death at an early age has become such a matter of course that actors and others routinely scan the obits right along with the audition calls. The dead from the world of the American stage, like the souls of Grover’s Corners, sit in their chairs looking out upon the living, and the living still don’t know very much.

AIDS is probably the greatest catastrophe ever to hit the American theater. By now, more than a dozen years into the epidemic, we’ve all read the stories of the famous and not-so-famous who have died. Directors John Hirsch and Wilford Leach, choreographer Michael Bennett, playwrights Scott McPherson and Robert Chesley and actor-director-writer Charles Ludlam are just a few of the stage’s fallen stars. Any theater company can recite a litany of deceased colleagues. It is an unfathomable and immeasurable toll.

But there is another side to this bleak story: The AIDS plague has also inspired the most significant artistic ferment in recent memory. There has been heroic creativity in the face of the disease--a burst of energy that, however painfully ironic it may be, has brought a new kind of life out of death to the American stage.

On April 29, “Millennium Approaches”--Part I of Tony Kushner’s epic “Angels in America,” seen at the Mark Taper Forum in November--opens on Broadway. It is the most anticipated show of the New York season. Also, the William Finn-James Lapine musical “Falsettos” is currently running at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre. Both of these critically acclaimed and popular works feature central characters who have AIDS.

The presence of these two hits isn’t just a milestone for AIDS in the theater, nor even for gay theater. It is a portentous moment for the American stage.

“If someone had told us five years ago that the most sought-after work in the American theater today would be an eight-hour epic with Blakean visions of AIDS, we would have thought they were nuts,” says performance artist Tim Miller, referring to the Kushner work. “Clearly, something juicy has happened.”

AIDS has imbued the American theater with an unparalleled sense of moral urgency, which has translated into a bumper crop of provocative work.

“As challenging as this massive loss is, we’ve also come up with powerful new voices that have helped tear the lies off the Reagan-Bush era,” Miller says.

“AIDS has wreaked havoc--and created new politics and cultures. Crisis generates response and cultural documents, and AIDS has done that, energizing and challenging queer culture’s politics and possibilities.”

Now, those politics are rippling out to the general consciousness.

“ ‘Angels’ is part of a second or third generation of writing about the epidemic,” Kushner says. “There have been plays since the epidemic started, but now there’s an appetite in the general public to take a look at it.”

While theater may not reach the numbers of people that TV and film do, the stage has cleared the path for the mass media. When film and TV first sought to deal with AIDS, they turned to the theater, adapting successful plays like William Hoffman’s “As Is” for the screen. “Film is starting to catch up,” says Fountain Theatre Artistic Director Steven Sachs, “but theater is leading the way as far as the arts community is concerned on a national level.”

AIDS plays defy any narrow definition. Entries include the groundbreaking 1985 dramas “As Is” and Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart,” “Angels in America,” and the plays and performance art of Reza Abdoh, Michael Kearns, James Carroll Pickett, Ron Athey, Tim Miller, John Fleck, Karen Finley and countless others, many of them Angelenos.

The epidemic has been addressed by a wide array of artists and venues, from Broadway to nonprofit. Works directly addressing AIDS, featuring characters with AIDS or tangentially influenced by the epidemic’s shadow have also proliferated in both the mainstream and alternative arenas.

Just scan the current Los Angeles theater listings and you’ll find works as varied as Wendell Jones’ and David Stanley’s “AIDS! The Musical!” (Skylight Theatre) and Kearns’ “Cyrano” takeoff “Myron, a Fairy Tale in Black and White” (St. Genesius Theatre), among others.

But the scope and range of AIDS in the theater go beyond AIDS plays per se. There are also plays in these listings influenced by, if not literally about, the disease, such as a revival of Alan Bowne’s “Beirut” (Third Street Theatre), gay duo Keegan & Lloyd’s “Two Lives: One Pair of Pants” and the recent Pasadena Playhouse production of Jonathan Tolins’ “The Twilight of the Golds,” among others. Then too, there are the many cabarets and other performances whose proceeds go to AIDS-related causes.

Artistically, AIDS has expanded the tone and emotional range of the contemporary stage. “AIDS has reclaimed anger, sentiment and tragedy for the theater,” Miller says. “ ‘The Normal Heart’ is a melodrama, and that’s what I love about it--its willingness to tap powerful feelings, to get Shakespearean in its sense of loss, Lear-like in its anger. Theater had gotten too cool for those repressed emotions, too smart for its own good.”

Taken together, these works represent a wave of activity that crosses not only artistic genres, but institutional and audience boundaries as well. Perhaps even more important, the high profile and crossover success have helped to bring a new awareness of gay life into mainstream culture.

While AIDS doesn’t kill only gay men, its ravages were felt first in that part of the population--a community that has long found a creative home in theater. Not surprisingly, then, it was mostly gay writers who first took it upon themselves to bring the subject of AIDS into the theater, although this too is changing.

AIDS in the theater could help change America’s attitude toward gay rights. Much as President Clinton’s attention to the plight of gays and lesbians in the military has been credited with broadening public discourse, AIDS in the theater has put the disease into popular culture and called attention to the marginalization of gays in general.

Often it takes a crisis to throw into relief the plight of a long-oppressed sector of society. In that way, the theater of AIDS may be emerging as the civil rights play of our time, doing for gay rights in America what “Dutchman” or “A Raisin in the Sun”--or even the writings of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison--did for civil rights and race relations more than a generation ago.

“The written arts--novels, poetry and the theater--have played a role in developing consciousness,” Kushner says. “You’d have to turn to the church or music--or to a lesser extent, theater--in the civil rights movement for an analogy. The AIDS activist movement created an aesthetic in service of the activism, just as soul was an aesthetic in service of the civil rights movement.”

It’s a turning point, albeit a preliminary one. “There’s a huge historical shift happening now that has to do with the hole in the homophobic wall that the health crisis may have punched,” Kushner continues. “Gays and lesbians are beginning to be considered a legitimate minority. But African-Americans have been recognized as a legitimate minority at least since the ‘60s and they’re still discriminated against.”

“Over eight to nine years, has AIDS in the theater changed the culture?” Michael Kearns asks. “Probably the answer is yes. God bless Larry Kramer. I’ve heard a lot of middle-class heterosexual people define their knowledge of AIDS by saying, ‘I saw “The Normal Heart.” ’ “

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Any little thing that makes you feel less alone is what these plays are.

--Harvey Fierstein

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Gay theater is a drama of identity and recognition, much as feminist drama was during the ‘70s and ‘80s. It has both shown a community to itself and presented that group and its concerns to a more general audience.

The emergence of gay theater in America--and the gay movement in general--dates to the late ‘60s. Mart Crowley’s 1968 Off Broadway play “The Boys in the Band,” which opens for its 25th anniversary production on Wednesday at Hollywood’s Fountain Theatre, is the landmark work.

The play, which originally ran for more than 1,000 performances at Theatre Four in New York, focuses on a group of men celebrating a colleague’s birthday. Popular and controversial, the script was made into a 1970 film directed by William Friedkin, featuring the entire original cast.

Four of those cast members--Frederick Combs, Keith Prentice, Robert La Tourneaux and Leonard Frey--and director Robert Moore have since died of complications of AIDS. The benefit run at the Fountain (all proceeds are going to Equity Fights AIDS) is director Sachs’ tribute to these men, especially Combs, who died just recently and was a friend.

“When the play was first produced, gays were often the butt of jokes,” Sachs says. “This was the first play that presented homosexuals as three-dimensional characters with human problems. This was also the first play that had gay slang in it, and that was shocking.”

“The Boys in the Band,” which has since been criticized for its characters’ self-loathing, came along only one year before the 1969 Stonewall rebellion. Set off by a police raid on a Greenwich Village gay bar, that uprising is often cited as the first focal event of the contemporary gay liberation movement.

From then on, there were more--and less stereotypical--gay characters in popular drama. Gay plays themselves also began to proliferate in New York, as did theaters devoted to gay work. Gay theaters were established in many cities throughout the country by the early ‘80s.

Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song Trilogy” brought gay theater into the commercial theater. The piece, first produced by the Glines (a group that backs gay-theater projects) in 1981, featured the author in the lead role.

In 1983, the hit “La Cage aux Folles,” with book by Fierstein, was the first mainstream musical to bring aspects of the gay lifestyle and camp aesthetic to broad audiences. At that time, a number of other gay-themed works were also being developed in New York. And AIDS was just beginning to filter out to public awareness.

By Kearns’ account, Rebecca Ranson’s “Warren” was one of the first AIDS plays produced in the United States. First staged in Atlanta in 1984, it was seen in L.A. the following year. It was not, however, the first AIDS work in L.A.: That honor goes to Jeff Hagedorn’s monologue “One,” performed in 1984. But the real wave in L.A. theater started in 1985 with “Warren” and “Night Sweat,” Kearns says.

The first AIDS play in New York was Robert Chesley’s dark comedy “Night Sweat,” in the spring of 1984. Shortly thereafter, Stephen Holt’s drama “Fever of Unknown Origin” opened. Several other plays staged in 1984-85, though not directly about AIDS, dealt with the subject.

The landmark production, though, was Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart,” produced by the Public Theater in 1985. Focusing on the 1981 beginning of the volunteer organization known as the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, Kramer’s play called public attention to the epidemic with allegations that the government, the press and then-New York Mayor Edward I. Koch had been slow to respond to AIDS. (Barbra Streisand has had this property in the works for years, and it is reportedly finally wending its way to the screen.)

That same year, Hoffman’s “As Is” debuted at the Circle Repertory Theatre, with financial backing from the Glines. Unlike Kramer’s polemic against the system, this play focused on one couple’s relationship and the events and emotions that ensue when a man returns to care for his former lover, who has contracted AIDS. Somewhat abstract onstage, complete with a Greek chorus and scenic montage, the play was presented in a more realistic mode when it was made into a cable-TV movie the following year.

“In 1984, we--the gay community--were naive; we needed a sanctuary for our tears,” says Kearns of the early AIDS dramas. “Catharsis was the issue. But now we’ve evolved, and AIDS theater has too.”

A couple of years after Kramer’s and Hoffman’s dramas, AIDS plays began to proliferate on both coasts. The East not only saw revivals of these two seminal works, but also such new entries as Fierstein’s “Safe Sex.”

Robert Chesley’s “Jerker, or the Helping Hand,” played Off Broadway in 1987 and made it to L.A. in 1988. Portraying a series of phone-sex encounters between two men, “Jerker,” said then-Times theater critic Dan Sullivan, was “gamy stuff, even for the ‘80s,” adding: “I’ve never seen a play that went from the near-pornographic to the tragic, but ‘Jerker’ achieves it.” (The Federal Communications Commission found the script “offensive” when portions of it were broadcast on KPFK-FM.)

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All my humor is based on destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without and violence, I’d be standing in the bread line right back of J. Edgar Hoover.

--Lenny Bruce

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Smiling Michael Kearns sits in a blue Naugahyde booth in a Silver Lake coffee shop. Dressed in a bold print shirt, his hair slicked back into a discrete ponytail, the veteran actor-writer-director-producer’s fresh-faced enthusiasm and GQ good looks give the lie to his 43 years.

But this is a man who has spent nearly a fourth of that life-span making theater about AIDS. Kearns, who tested HIV-positive four years ago, came to Los Angeles in 1972, where he began to work in TV. At the same time, he also got involved with small theater.

During the late ‘70s, Kearns began to speak out publicly about gay issues. Then, around 1982-83, AIDS focused both his activism and his art. “It sounds like such a sound bite to say, ‘AIDS made me an artist,’ but it’s true,” he once said.

When Rock Hudson died in 1985, the media seized upon Kearns in his de facto role as “the only openly gay actor in Hollywood.” Before that, Kearns had been getting a lot of film and TV work; afterward, the gigs dried up for the man who dared speak out against industry homophobia. Fortunately for the theater world, Kearns turned his energy toward the stage.

He was at first widely hailed in theater circles for his “intimacies,” a multi-character solo performance. Among his numerous other projects dealing with AIDS, there is his recently revived “Rock,” a Hudson-inspired theater piece.

Kearns currently weighs in as a writer, with his “Myron, a Fairy Tale in Black and White,” a takeoff on “Cyrano de Bergerac” that also typifies the kind of dark humor that has cropped up in a number of recent plays that deal with AIDS.

Another darkly funny AIDS play is Paul Rudnick’s Off Broadway hit “Jeffrey,” which brought in extremely favorable reviews.

Rudnick himself has written that his play was partly inspired by a hospitalized friend: “Eddie was not only dying, he was whining. One afternoon, after leaving his room, we . . . burst into uncontrollable laughter. Eddie was just not a suitably noble dying person; he was, in fact, a huge pain.”

“Gay writers, drawing on the repartee that is a form of gay soul, use camp, irony and epigram to, if not defeat the virus, at least scorn and contain it,” Rudnick went on to say.

Partly, the humor is a way to cope. “The gallows humor that we’re seeing is an escape valve,” says Beverly Hills psychologist Stan Zeigler, who numbers among his clients people in the arts and entertainment who are HIV-positive or have AIDS. “If we can’t find humor, the darkness is profound and overwhelming.”

But there’s more to it than that. The strategy of humor has given rise to a hybrid form. “Gay men have always survived by our humor, so AIDS is not going to render us humorless,” Kearns says. “But even in 1993, the concept of having a man dying onstage with people laughing is disconcerting. AIDS has created a new genre. Is it comedy or tragedy? It’s absolutely both.”

Often humor is combined with, or used in the service of, an activist agenda, as in much performance art. And performance art--especially during the AIDS era--has begun to have an effect on mainstream theater.

“Performance art has long explored poetic, lyrical drama and more aggressive styles than the stage, which is still mired in naturalism,” says gay activist Miller, whose recent solo works have included much about AIDS. Miller, who is co-artistic director of Highways, is also one of the NEA Four, the group of performance artists currently suing the National Endowment for the Arts over grants that were recommended, then vetoed, in 1990. The artists charge that they are being descriminated against because of the sexual politics in their work.

“The heightened theatricality in performance art--as well as the street activism of the ACT-UP model--helped create a way for a theater like the Taper to assay ‘Angels in America,’ their most challenging text ever,” Miller says. “It helped prepare the audience and critical eye to see the wild shifts in ‘Angels’ and its vision.”

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I should point out that I have always hated anything that borders on the non-realistic.

--Larry Kramer

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There are, of course, Bastilles yet to be stormed. Eight years after “The Normal Heart” gave so many theatergoers their first look at AIDS, playwright Kramer, who has been HIV-positive since 1988, wrote a new play. “The Destiny of Me,” produced last year in New York, was what Kramer called “one of those ‘family/memory’ plays . . . most playwrights feel compelled . . . to try.”

It was, in other words, very much in a realistic vein. Not so Kushner’s seven-hour “Angels in America,” Part I of which has undergone its own meta-drama on its way to the Great White Way. Times’ theater critic Sylvie Drake called “Angels” a “chaotic, compelling, wickedly funny, frequently powerful, always serious, occasionally sentimental tour of troubled/troubling America of the 1980s.”

Complications--financial, not about content--set in when the decision was made to take “Angels” to Broadway. Kushner said he wanted performances to remain affordably priced in order to diversify the audience, yet that goal was at odds with the substantial costs and risks associated with transferring such a work. Now, a ticket-pricing scheme has been worked out to placate both Kushner and the producers.

With an estimated budget of $2 million, “Millennium Approaches” is due to open at the 945-seat Walter Kerr Theatre. It is directed by George C. Wolfe, who abruptly--and to the dismay of parties who believed he had a contractual obligation--dropped his work on a production of Jose Rivera’s “Marisol” to take the “Angels” job. Part II, “Perestroika,” is supposed to join Part I in repertory, starting in October. (No lawsuits were filed against Wolfe.)

Broadway notwithstanding, if theater is to continue to serve as a cultural beachhead, then the scope of AIDS plays must continue to broaden. Just as the feminist movement was initially thought to be the exclusive province of middle-class Anglo women--and in some quarters is still regarded that way--so too has the AIDS fight been cast for too long as a gay white male problem.

Partly, this is a continuation of a tactical error made early on. “As gay white men, we were screaming that AIDS isn’t just the province of gay white men,” Kearns says. “But most of the theater that was coming out at the beginning and through the mid-’80s was about gay white men. Our message was at odds with our political agenda.”

And even if the artists’ agenda is aligned, there are problems on the audience side of the proscenium too.

“Is the public ready to go see a play about an African-American man with HIV/AIDS?” Kearns asks. “Well, it’s hard to fill the St. Genesius Theatre’s 40 seats,” he says, referring to the venue where “Myron” is running, “even with incredible reviews.”

Playwright-performance artist Luis Alfaro, who runs the Teatro VIVA project at VIVA, a Silverlake organization for lesbian and gay Latino artists, concurs. Sometimes it takes non-traditional methods to reach populations that aren’t used to going to the theater--or aren’t used to receiving sufficient AIDS information either.

“Gay Latinos don’t necessarily gravitate toward West Hollywood,” Alfaro says. “But through theater, we have been able to design a program to reach large numbers of gay Latinos.”

Yet Latinos, African-Americans, Asian-Americans and others--let alone gays from each of those groups--have been, and remain, largely invisible on conventional stages.

“The people who run the theaters want to see themselves exactly, and that’s why you don’t see people of color and women,” Alfaro says. “How can you rage when nobody even sees you?”

There is also a lack of awareness about the women’s side of the epidemic. Kearns and Pickett are working on a piece called “AIDS/US/WOMEN” that opens May 23 at Highways. Lauren Jardine, who has been involved in the gay and lesbian movement for 20 years and directly with AIDS since 1985, is interviewing cast members and weaving their personal stories into a script.

Four of the eight women featured are HIV-positive. “We’ve tried to show different facets of how this disease impacts women,” Jardine says. “We’re coming up against denial that the disease impacts women. Gay men have seen what lack of access can do and have moved into political action. What’s important about this play is that that message will get out there.”

Getting the message out there has certainly been a key function of AIDS in the theater. Yet it has also done much more--for audiences, artists and the art form itself. The plays will stand as a legacy of the men and women who have contributed to this cultural watershed.

“It’s a metaphor for a lot of our lives,” Kearns says. “On the one hand, the worst thing that ever happened in my life is that I became infected with HIV. On the other hand, I could make the case that being infected with HIV is the best thing that ever happened in my life. It refueled me, gave me clarity and made me care about things.”