‘Sharing the Delirium’ of AIDS : Theater: A new collection of predominantly activist-oriented stage works illustrates ‘the division between first- and second-generation AIDS plays,’ the book’s editor says. Six of the seven are by West Coast writers.

Even though California has played a major role in shaping some of the most important plays and musicals of recent seasons, the West is seldom hailed as a hub of theatrical innovation. Yet when it comes to theater about AIDS, Los Angeles artists seem to dominate the genre.

“Sharing the Delirium: Second Generation AIDS Plays and Performances,” a Heinemann paperback edited by Therese Jones, is a collection of edgy, predominantly activist-oriented recent stage works.

Six of the book’s seven entries are by West Coast writers. What’s more, four of the plays (Michael Kearns’ “Myron, A Fairy Tale in Black and White”; James Carroll Pickett’s “Queen of Angels”; Wendell Jones/David Stanley/Robert Berg’s “AIDS! The Musical!”; Tim Miller’s “My Queer Body” ) premiered at Highways in Santa Monica, the performance venue that Miller co-founded in 1989.

Jones, a humanities professor at the University of Colorado, will be present when several of these L.A. authors read from their works in “Sharing the Delirium” tonight at A Different Light bookstore in West Hollywood. A similar reading will take place at Highways in Santa Monica on July 11.

The book’s table of contents might seem overly skewed toward one community of artists, but the author says that happened without design.

“I didn’t set out with a plan to include predominantly L.A. writers,” says Jones, who didn’t know any of the authors prior to her script search. “What I hoped was to bring together the most recent and radical expressions of AIDS, and as it happened, most of those originated on the West Coast. It seemed to be the site of the most experimental, confrontational, political and inventive AIDS drama.”

These are in-your-face plays, not the kind of fare most publishers solicit. “It’s difficult to get a play that is not a Broadway hit into print, so that’s the first piece of good news,” says Pickett, who co-founded the organization Artists Confronting AIDS with Kearns in 1984. (The group will receive a portion of the income from “Sharing the Delirium.”)

“The work is recorded and in a version approved by the playwright,” Pickett continues. “For me, there’s a sense that it will become part of the complete record of who I was and what I did while I was here on the planet.”

For Jones, the collection also illustrates the evolution of AIDS theater since the pioneering works of the mid-1980s. “The division between first- and second-generation AIDS plays is more complex than the practical chronological marker of the 1980s and ‘90s,” she says. “Second-generation AIDS theater has a strong element of comedy.”

Yet humor isn’t the only distinguishing characteristic. “First-generation plays like ‘As Is’ and ‘The Normal Heart’ were more traditional in form and definitely more sentimental,” says Jones. “They were educationally driven. They disseminated information about AIDS to the gay community, as well as to the straight community about gays.”

Early AIDS plays also had a different relationship to the pre-plague past. “In the first generation, there is a nostalgic reconstruction of life before the epidemic that seems to be missing from second-generation AIDS theater,” says Jones. “That nostalgic reconstruction is meaningless now.”

Jones also argues that early AIDS drama was given to sympathy-evoking strategies. “Another first-generation characteristic is the way in which the disease itself is featured or characterized,” she says. “In a first-generation play, AIDS becomes a mechanism for humanizing or redeeming the gay character.”

Still, not everyone is convinced that the distinction between first- and second-generation AIDS plays is viable. “Well, it sounds more like a marketing technique to me than a philosophy,” says playwright Pickett. “I know what they mean, but I never set out to write a ‘second-generation AIDS play.’ ”

What is clear, however, is that works in which AIDS figures prominently have come to constitute a significant wave of defiant artistic energy, much of it coming from L.A. In this way, the theater has become a weapon in an ongoing battle of resistance.

“Historians and scientists are turning away from using a plague model to understand and define AIDS and turning toward a chronic disease model,” says Jones. “These plays are about living with a chronic disease.”

And they are also, perhaps inevitably, about living on beyond whatever toll that disease takes. “It will be a record,” says Pickett. “We were here. There were good times and bad.”

* A reading of “Sharing the Delirium,” tonight at 8, A Different Light, 8853 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood; (310) 854-6601. Also July 11, 8:30 p.m., Highways, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica; $10 (to benefit Artists Confronting AIDS); (213) 660-TKTS.