‘Lonely Planet’ Maps Out Symbolic Look at Friendship

Steven Dietz, author of “Lonely Planet,” enjoys symbols. We know this because he has set his play in a map store, and by the final curtain virtually every globe and poster has been weighed and inventoried as metaphorical freight. Propping up the drama, as it were.

In Dietz’s hands, this is not such a bad thing. “Lonely Planet,” which is being produced by the Fountain Theatre at the Matrix Theatre in West Hollywood, is yet another play about AIDS, but through symbolism and a kind of casual, good-natured wit, this one-act achieves a certain degree of lyricism and subtlety often missing in the genre.

The two characters are close friends with deliberately vague backgrounds and sexual identities. They may or may not be gay, may or may not have been lovers. Mild-mannered Jody (Taylor Nichols) runs the lightly stocked map store, which, as far as we can tell, exists to serve the playwright’s purpose more than to serve the customers, who remain invisible.

But Jody is avoiding more than just business problems. It seems that friends are rapidly disappearing from his life, an unpleasant fact he strives unsuccessfully to ignore. Of course, he has Carl (Philip Anglim) to remind him.

Carl makes a memorable entrance, delivering a tirade about the ubiquity of boredom. He is, as Jody informs us, “a fixture” at the store and either a flaky nuisance or a philosophical drifter, or perhaps a bit of both. His oddest habit consists of hauling numerous chairs into Jody’s shop, giving it the slapdash ambience of a garage sale.

The text acknowledges a debt to Ionesco’s famous one-act “The Chairs,” in which an old couple welcomes a large gathering of evidently imaginary guests. Yet Dietz’s point is not quite so open-ended: Each of these chairs belonged to one of Jody’s dead friends. As Carl keeps piling on the surrogate tombstones, the mortified shopkeeper is forced to map out his own fears and illusions.

“Lonely Planet” basically argues that denial is unhealthy--hardly a shocking observation. Yet there is a quiet power in its portrait of friendship, even in its somewhat dog-eared map-making analogies. Dietz--a widely produced playwright whose adaptation of “Dracula” bows next spring at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego--is a strong enough writer to bring it off, and he stops just short of straining too hard. Carl on the definition of friendship: “Pack up and move on two days’ notice. The people who help you move are friends.”

Helping the play move are director Stephen Sachs and his very solid pair of actors, who for the most part wisely underplay roles that could have sunk into mush. Anglim, in particular, while making the character at times more perverse than he needs to be, still manages to find enough humanity to make him an arresting voice of conscience.

Profits from “Lonely Planet” will be donated to Equity Fights AIDS and Voices, Fountain Theatre’s AIDS/HIV acting workshop.

* “Lonely Planet,” Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Ave. Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m., Sun. 7 p.m. Dark Nov. 28. Ends Dec. 22. $25. (213) 663-1525. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.