THEATER REVIEW : Rewrite Might Help ‘A Need for Expression’ : One-acts focused on AIDS don’t work. Lack of direction doesn’t make the production any better.

“A Need for Expression,” at Two Roads Theatre, is in need of a rewrite. Designed as a two-part evening full of enlightened thoughts about AIDS awareness, Christopher Armbrister’s production means to raise funds for two key theater-based AIDS programs--Equity Fights AIDS and Broadway Cares. But to raise money, you’ve got to put on a show, and “Expression” doesn’t qualify.

It is also not really a paired set of one-acts. The first, Rideaux Baldwin’s “HIVers,” is a one-act play, of a sort. The second, Chuck Rounds’ “Culture Melange,” is a series of half-baked scenes tossed together and haplessly connected by weak, poor-me narration. This is the kind of bad AIDS theater that popped up more than 10 years ago, when the still-emerging health crisis elicited fresh, emotional, barely formed broadsides onstage and in the streets.

Precisely because of the evolving sociopolitical developments surrounding AIDS, a surpassing work of art such as Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” could emerge. AIDS has grown from a headline to a metaphor, from a disease to a part of the Zeitgeist , but this evening’s sloppiness suggests that news of it is just getting out.

This feeling is doubly strange, since “HIVers” is set in a vaguely futurist America--or perhaps some planetary colony controlled by America--where HIV - positive patients are sent like so many leper patients. Baldwin never explains the underlying reasons for this system in his speculative fiction, so we’re never convinced of this world. (The impoverished, uncredited set doesn’t help matters.)

More crucial, though, “HIVers” is emotionally unconvincing. Rena Heinrich plays a snippy, unlikable young Jessie who is a non-drug-using virgin--and yet somehow contracted HIV. Jason Hyndman’s clinic aide Joel rightly finds this incredible, though he is guilt-ridden by an old flame’s recent AIDS-related suicide. From paper-thin characters and creaky dialogue, Baldwin forms an overly long melodrama of two souls coming to terms with each other. Under Peter Boyer’s direction, it all plays out like an under-rehearsed acting exercise.

At least “HIVers” has some kind of rounded narrative. “Melange” is just that, in the worst dramatic sense. Intended to be a collection of snapshots from the AIDS front lines, the whole work sounds like various unfinished bits desperately in need of completion.

Two scenes explicitly highlight this: In one, an HIV-positive roommate (Graham Shaw) watches in horror as his HIV-negative buddy (Ryan Michael) pricks his finger with an infected needle; in another, an infected gay man (Peter Boyer) informs his ex-girlfriend (Aimee Leigh) that she should get an AIDS test--and then she must inform her new husband (Hyndman). Both scenes have seeds of being comic and horrific at the same time; but banal dialogue, a lack of dramatic surprise and Armbrister’s slack of direction sucks the life out of these moments.

* “A Need For Expression”--Two Roads Theatre, 4348 Tujunga Ave., Studio City. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends Oct. 29. $15. (818) 763-2119.