AIDS Play Just Not Convincing

If trying to make a connection between AIDS affliction and parental abuse is an achievement, then Bretton B. Holmes has achieved something with his new play, “Water, Water, Everywhere,” at the Bitter Truth Theatre.

But the link is so awkwardly dramatized that the idea of one sort of pain somehow being married to the other becomes irrelevant. Holmes wants to create tragedy, with a touch of feel-good catharsis at the end, but all this half-written play amounts to is a grinding bummer.

We’re first presented with Gwinnet (William Joseph Hill), who is dying of AIDS and being nursed by his cousin, Rebecca (Pamela Malof). Wondering where his older long-absent brother William is, Gwinnet recalls growing up in the 1960s under the brutal tyranny of his mother, Sylvia (Jill Basey). He remembers that William (Darrel Guilbeau) rebelled and that their henpecked father, Herman (Alan Abelew), passively watched as Sylvia had her way sexually with both boys. The fallout is that Gwinnet matured into a gay man, and William ended up in a bitter marriage that pushes him to the edge of suicide.

More than anything else, “Water, Water, Everywhere” is conceived, under Joen Nielsen Lewis’ haphazard direction, with the notion that simply putting the terrible situations onstage is enough, without considering what is actually being suggested.

The play’s suggestion that Sylvia’s abuse has something to do with pushing Gwinnet toward loving men over women is just one of several hazards the play lays in its own path. Even watching strong-willed Gwinnet fade away in his bed at an AIDS hospice, or his monstrous mother rule like a Gestapo officer, proves not nearly enough to keep this terribly leaky play afloat.

And speaking of leaks and floating, Holmes has a literary-cum-nautical analogy running underneath his domestic melodrama, with Gwinnet and William either speaking about the sea, dreaming about it or actually sailing (albeit offstage). Individual scenes are titled with maritime terms, which more often than not have a tenuous connection with what’s played out; the title itself, taken from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” strikes a poetic tone pointedly missing from scenes that are badly in need of rewrites.

Instead of literary substance, the play gives us crude stereotypes, starting with Gwinnet as the kind of wisecracking, joke-a-minute patient long a cliche of AIDS-themed drama. Not only does actor Hill not look sickly or behave as if ill, but there’s no underlying sadness to his quandary--amazing, considering the setting is 1982, when AIDS was an unnamed plague.

A huge part of the problem is that the family, as Holmes has written it, has the depth of stick figures, thus diminishing the human costs. Not that the cast has much to work with, but the actors take things no further and seem adrift navigating the play’s problematic flashing back and forth in time.

Contrast this with the recent, brilliant Timothy Mason family drama, “The Fiery Furnace,” at the nearby Eclectic Company Theatre, where the cast pulled off the stunning illusion of aging before our eyes. It can be done; it just isn’t done here.

BE THERE

“Water, Water, Everywhere,” Bitter Truth Theatre, 11050 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. Saturdays 8 p.m., Sundays 3 p.m. Ends Sept. 10. $12. (818) 766-9702. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.