Theatre Reviews: A Question of Mercy

Psychopathia Sexualis By John Patrick Shanley Manhattan Theatre Club 131 West 55th Street 581-1212

by Michael Feingold

Rabe's hero is a semiretired M.D. who's enlisted by a gay acquaintance to help the man's lover, who's wasting away from cancer brought on by AIDS, get free of his agony. Expectably, the doctor goes from horrified refusal to willing participation, abetted by the dying man's lover and a woman friend-and on to a kind of guilty panic, complete with nightmares of being arrested for murder. Also expectably, the plan goes awry, the suicide attempt fails, and the man is briefly rescued by paramedics, leaving him enough time to convey to the doctor that he now wants to live.

Rabe is neither sordid nor squeamish: We get enough medical detail to perceive the man's pain, enough kisses to suggest the influence the couple's sexual bond might have on the matter, enough of the suicide attempt itself to see what goes wrong and why. What we don't get is any attempt, dramatically, to make a case for death; the man's mind is already made up. The doctor trots out all the obvious arguments on behalf of life, only to be told that they won't do. But we never see, particularly, why they won't: Despite all the references to chronic diarrhea and other aggravations of the immunodeficient, the patient we see, rather laconically embodied by Juan Carlos Hernandez, is composed, alert, articulate, relatively ambulatory, surrounded by love, and appears to have no more reason for wanting to die than thousands of other people who face a new day every morning with disabling conditions.

And even granting that the play was written before the latest news on protease inhibitors, it's probably the only AIDS play ever written without any mention of the hope that scientific advances might relieve some of the pain. There's no visible reason for this man to want to die. He is not-I'm thinking of actual people I knew who suffered through worse situations-a blob of inert flesh kept alive by an IV and a respirator, or a 200-pound athlete shriveled to a fourth of his normal size, too weak to do anything but moan. Any gay New Yorker over 40 must know of a thousand such cases. The simple truth about life is that most people prefer to live it, and even the bulk of those who think they might prefer a quick death are surprisingly easy to deflect.

This is why I wish Rabe had taken on the larger issue, articulating the right to death in a way which couldn't be blasted away, as easily as the weak assertions in A Question of Mercy could, by a few gruff words from Nat Hentoff. In real terms, the topic is virtually never raised onstage. Here, too, the news has outdistanced Rabe, with every report of Jack Kevorkian's cases adding ramifications that his characters never think of.

Instead, the play's subject quietly slips from the why to the how, from the morality of assisted suicide to the possible procedural slipups involved. This reduces it to a sort of ethical crime thriller, not ''Should we help our friend kill himself?'' but ''Can we help him and not get caught?'' As Rabe's interest is in the moral aspect, he doesn't create the thriller scenes with much conviction (though the doctor's nightmares are fun). His dialogue, which always tends toward the abstract, turns particularly wooden here.

Hughes handles this oversolemn rite decently, but never forges a link between his cast and the script that can make the latter come alive. Stephen Spinella's jittery, birdlike brightness as the healthy lover is the most vivid thing about the evening. Zach Grenier, pudgily earnest as the doctor, and Veanne Cox, visibly struggling to push some life into the blank role of the friend, are easy to bear but hard to enthuse about.

It's much easier to rouse enthusiasm for Alfred Uhry's The Last Night of Ballyhoo, which slips its serious ideas stingingly into your mind by the simple device of not claiming such lofty aspirations. A charming, lightly superficial romantic comedy, turning on whether two teenage female cousins in 1939 Atlanta will be asked to a big social event, is repeatedly transfigured by sudden bursts of emotional fire from its subterranean theme. The big social event, Bally- hoo, is an annual celebration by the South's wealthier, highly assimilated German Jews. The two cousins, their widowed mothers, their uncle, and the ''pushy'' Russian-Jewish boy from the Bronx who asks the blonder of the two girls to the dance, all have ideas, sometimes violently expressed, of what it means to be a Jew. And it's 1939.

Uhry lets this intense material play in and out of his comedy as it crops up, not edging away from it and not sledgehammering it. His interest, like his sense of humor, is vested in chronicling this paradoxical family's life, notating its eccentricities-they think it's okay for Jews to have a Christmas tree if they don't put a star on top-rather than indicting it. His objectivity implies a necessary forgiveness; we don't object when the family reaches a rather too neat happy ending, because the painful notes struck earlier are still in our minds. The two people who clasp hands over the Sabbath candles at the last moment are two Jews being familial, but they are also still the Bronx boy and the woman who called him a ''New York kike.'' A smiley curtain tableau that tells us it's time to go home isn't going to erase that any too quickly.

Equally ineradicable is Ron Lagomarsino's production, lovely in its unforced realness and close to perfect in its acting. Dana Ivey, as the overwrought mother whose stress and misguided propriety drive the household, can and does take over a fair number of scenes, but even she has to share space when her colleagues are in such fine form: Celia Weston as her recessive, dotty sister-in-law; Jessica Hecht as her even dottier daughter; Arija Bareikis, lambent as Weston's daughter; Terry Beaver as the put-upon brother who supports the clan; and Paul Rudd as the intruder from New York. In the 2000-teens, they may yet wax nostalgic about the great New York casts of the '90s.

They might just mean that we were privileged, from time to time, to have Edward Herrmann onstage. His current incarnation is as a half-mad, maybe preternaturally wise psychiatrist in the latest dessert from John Patrick Shanley's cookshop. One can't fault Shanley for being trivial, for toying thoughtfully with ideas, any more than one can fault Rabe for being earnest. It's just that, as with Rabe, a certain sense of reality seems to have been left out. In Shanley's case the result is endearing, but it seems a lot of effort and expense for a short journey into not very deep depths.

A man who thinks he can't perform sexually without a pair of his father's socks on the premises has been tricked into surrendering them to his shrink; the ''superior'' guy he calls his best friend volunteers to get them back, only to be reduced himself by the analyst to a blubbering jelly. It's left to the sock-man's no-nonsense fiancee to save the socks. She does, there's a wedding, and-why hasn't Shanley written the book for a musical? When his plays have any plot at all, like this one, they resemble musicals with the songs left out.

As if stretch-testing the triviality, Daniel Sullivan's production has a maximally disparate cast: Even in New York, it's hard to believe these five would know each other. Because Margaret Colin and Andrew McCarthy have relatively bland stage presences, Daniel Gerroll and Park Overall handily take over any scene that doesn't involve Herrmann, who's in optimal form as the shrink, beaming with manipulative good will. Gerroll and Overall animate the foolery; Herrmann very nearly justifies it.