Patient Is Least of Play’s Difficulties

Writer-director David Ste. Croix is keenly interested in how gays and lesbians convinced the American Psychiatric Assn. in the early 1970s to delete homosexuality from the organization’s official list of diseases.

He has translated his fascination into a new play, “A Difficult Patient,” staged in the auditorium of St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church in North Hollywood. But if ever there were a case of not making your interest also that of the audience, this is it.

As Stanley Kubrick once noted, the greatest sin for an artist is to be boring, and it is hard to imagine a more boring approach than Ste. Croix’s to such a potentially dramatic subject.

At least a conflict between gay and lesbian activists (long predating the AIDS era and providing the protest model for ACT-UP) and hidebound psychiatrists certain of their views of sexuality would seem to be dramatic.

But rather than humanizing this subject, much of Ste. Croix’s wordy script reads like a transcript of court cases, fatally written in a manner assuming that 500 words can say more than 50.

Of course, a playwright in control of his material knows that the opposite is the case, and the irony is that its sheer, voluminous weight, as well as its obvious, stick-figure characters, will turn more people off to the cause of “A Difficult Patient” than the dullest speech could.

Like a robotic TV channel-changer, the play alternates between scenes showing the activists--led by Jimmy (Ashley Scott Tillman) and Frank (Jeffry Druce)--facing off with the psychiatrists, and scenes observing psychiatric sessions between Dr. Hooker (Marcia Walter) and the titular patient and Jimmy’s lover, Lysses (Mark Allen Ruegg).

While Jimmy is way out of the closet, organizing so-called “zaps,” or uninvited interruptions and direct actions against anti-gay spokespersons, Lysses is uneasy being gay, convinced by his previous shrink that his sexuality is an unnatural effect of having an abusive father.

Hooker, assuring him this is nonsense, tries to guide Lysses toward an understanding of himself and his true love for Jimmy.

Meanwhile, Jimmy and Frank’s mission against the APA is a case of endless meetings. As any political activist can attest, life can seem like one endless meeting; done literally onstage, though, this can become a form of verbal torture. (It hardly helps that we must sit on hard, fold-out metal chairs in the stark auditorium space for nearly three hours.)

Ste. Croix’s mission, to ensure that his audience is completely informed on the minutiae of APA protocol, political strategies and the like, utterly ignores his dramatist’s mission to create interesting, specific individual characters.

We know little more about the vaguely drawn Jimmy, for instance, at the end than at the beginning.

In this case, resolution of a sort comes in the form of the ghost of Sigmund Freud (Al Calabrese), chiding the conservative shrinks for ignoring his writings on sexual identity, but typical of the play, doing so in the manner of yet another wordy, endless speech.

And while the ear is overwhelmed here, the eye has nothing to look at, with mostly stiff, uncomfortable-looking actors (except for Druce, who plays his gay activist/astronomer as if he’s doing a job for Don Corleone) standing around on a bare floor.

BE THERE

“A Difficult Patient,” St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church Auditorium, 11031 Camarillo St., North Hollywood. Tonight, Nov. 14-16, 20-22, 7:30 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m. Ends Nov. 22. $15. (818) 759-8382. Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes.