THEATER : Friendship in Face of Despair Is Explored

Late in March, a play called “Encore” lit up the Backstage Theatre in Costa Mesa. It was the inaugural performance of an open-ended Southland tour that continues this and next weekend at the Art for Life’s Sake Gallery in Irvine, but only one of the play’s authors, Molly Hardy, sat in the audience that night. Her co-author and longtime friend, Jim Boyer, was dead of AIDS.

“Encore” is an autobiographical account of the deep, spiritual friendship that blossomed between Hardy, a wife and mother, and Boyer, a gay musician who met her at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo and created theater pieces with her until his death in January, 1991.

It was first produced, in different form, in December of 1990 at the now-defunct Orange County Coalition of the Theatre Arts in Costa Mesa. After that performance, Hardy introduced Boyer, who had written the music for the play. He came down and sang a song with his guitar, and the audience gave him a huge, emotional ovation.

“It was a real acknowledgment of him as an artist and a person,” Hardy said.

A month later he was dead. But “Encore,” true to its name, is back again.

Hardy took it off the shelf after a gay-bashing incident early this year in Laguna Beach. “I kept hearing Jim’s voice,” she said. “ ‘You know, Molly,’ he would say, ‘this play speaks to all those fears and hatreds.’ ”

In the play, the Molly Hardy character is a straight woman in more ways than one; because she is naive, she asks many awkward questions that the real Molly Hardy, for one, would never ask her friend Jim. These questions need to be addressed, Hardy says, particularly at the high school and college levels, where the flow of potentially healing information often is dammed up by disapproving parents and nervous administrators.

Hardy told of one administrator she knows who booked a Kaiser Permanente presentation into a high school: “It was a real ‘how to’ piece, condoms and all. This administrator got into some real flak with the parents.”

“I’m really surprised at the fear level of addressing AIDS,” Hardy said. “ ‘Encore’ doesn’t say, ‘Hey, it’s OK to be gay, it’s OK to have sex.’ It’s about two friends who create something in the face of hopelessness.”

For the current tour, Hardy rewrote and restaged the piece so that it requires only four actors instead the original 14. But she believes that it still addresses as many concerns as ever: “Friendship, loyalty, compassion, AIDS, homosexuality, acceptance.”

She has deliberately cast teen-agers in the four roles even though the characters are supposed to be older. “I want to attract that audience--the high schools and colleges. I want kids to see kids their own age and know this could happen to them.

“I was shocked when Jim got it. I remember reading Newsweek and thinking of it as having to do with people in New York. I never thought it would touch me.”

AIDS has done more than touch Hardy. It has turned her into a crusader. Teen-agers, she said, are the fastest-growing AIDS population in America, and her voice burned with the fire of a reformer when she suggested that maybe some parents fear more than the sexual frankness that an honest discussion of AIDS would entail.

She mused on the idea that some people might not want their children to embrace a homosexual character as a human being, as a friend. “It’s one thing to go to Laguna and beat up a ‘fag,’ ” she said. “It’s another thing to know someone on a personal level and go through something with him.”