Can a good performance justify a bad play? Can a bad play be redeemed by a superb production? These were the questions raised by “Zero Positive,” a new play by Harry Kondoleon that opened at the Public Theater on June 1st and closed within the week, after twenty-five previews and seven performances. Not that Kenneth Elliott’s production was superb, exactly—merely better than the play deserved—but the level of the acting and the quality of his direction were so consistently high that they commanded attention in a way that the play itself never did. “Zero Positive” purported to be about AIDS: the title is a pun on “sero-positive,” the medical designation for the presence of HIV antibodies in the blood. To “test sero-positive” is to discover not that one has AIDS or will necessarily get AIDS but simply that one has been exposed to the virus. Nevertheless, when the hero of Kondoleon’s play, Himmer Blank (David Pierce), and his friend Samantha (Frances Conroy) find out that they have tested sero-positive, they unaccountably pull up stakes and check into a hospital.
The subject of AIDS is only incidental to Kondoleon’s play; the actual plot concerns Himmer’s desire to stage a production of his dead mother’s play, a work of juvenilia entitled “The Ruins of Athens.” First Himmer calls his old friend Patrick (Tony Shalhoub), a frustrated actor, who he hopes will be able to put him in touch with people in the theater world. Over lunch, Patrick attempts suicide by repeatedly stabbing the veins in his arms with a penknife, but manages, before swooning, to murmur the name of a wacky heiress he knows who is looking for something to spend her money on. The heiress (Beth Austin) turns out to be looking for a good man as well as a good cause, and strikes up a relationship with Himmer’s mad father, Jacob (Edward Atienza), an erstwhile poet who lives in the past and likes to play with toy trains. In the second act, the heiress has endowed the hospital where an AIDS-specialist friend of Samantha’s works with so much money that an entire room has been made over to Himmer and his friends and turned into a theater. In the last scene, we see Himmer’s mother’s play performed, knowing that at the end of it Himmer intends to commit suicide by drinking poison. We are scarcely surprised when the wrong person drinks from the tainted vessel.
That Mr. Kondoleon is trying to say something profound is clear: He wants to use AIDS as a metaphor for life’s tragic, unlooked-for disappointments. He also seeks to diminish the apocalyptic stature of AIDS, making it part of the background of contemporary life—like the burble of lunchtime conversation—in much the same way that the British playwright Christopher Hampton made murder and mayhem the polite background of his 1970 academic comedy “The Philanthropist.” “Zero Positive” somewhat resembles “The Philanthropist” in its attempt to mix farcical situations with surreal premises, but Kondoleon lacks Hampton’s verbal agility and his interest in ideas. This play is full of arch dialogue, one-liners that fall flat, precious imagery, and characters who speechify in complex periodic sentences without saying much of anything. Moreover, whereas the routine acts of terrorism and political violence alluded to in Hampton’s play were an imaginative construct—something of the playwright’s own making—Kondoleon here is drawing on (exploiting, really) a real-life circumstance and he hasn’t the courage to explore it, or even engage it. His characters could be dying of anything. Nothing in the play addresses the subject of AIDS, imaginatively or dramatically.
The only eloquent moment in the production at the Public was a visual one, provided by the set and lighting designers (Adrianne Lobel and Natasha Katz, respectively): a nighttime view suggestive of storybook America which appeared between scenes, when the stage lights went down and the houses on Jacob’s toy-train set lit up. Otherwise, “Zero Positive” was essentially a chance to see some fine actors trying to make the best of a bad situation: Mr. Pierce as one of those professionally witty New York homosexuals, Mr. Shalhoub as a parody heterosexual, Mr. Atienza as the unhinged father, Miss Austin as the perennially cheerful heiress, and Richard McMillan as a young man named Prentice, about whom we know no more than that he is breaking up with his boyfriend and that he collects religions. All of them struggled valiantly under difficult conditions, for these parts are grossly overwritten. With Mr. Elliott’s help, the play’s heavy-handedness was partially offset by consistent underacting. Only Miss Conroy, unable (as she often is) to keep from seeming actressy, failed to fit in with the ensemble.
Mr. Atienza and Mr. McMillan, who have worked extensively at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, and Mr. Pierce, who played Laertes in Liviu Ciulei’s “Hamlet” and Yasha in Peter Brook’s “The Cherry Orchard,” are skilled classical actors. It’s sad to see them wasted, but heartening to know that they are there.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, June 20, 1988