ADAM AND THE EXPERTS
Yes, this play is about AIDS. but it would be cheap to dismiss it as yet another AIDS play, for it compassionately depicts a denial of death we all understand.
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Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross cites denial as the great obstacle to a peaceful death, and you get lots of denial in Adam and the Experts–of death and of sex. Bumbalo’s title character is a gay an who’s so torn apart by the weekly funerals he attends that he has come to see sex as an early form of death. Worse, Adam faces the imminent loss of his 30-year-old best friend Eddie. Adam is frantic to do whatever it takes to save Eddie–and thus postpone confronting his own mortality and survivor guilt.
As the play eliminates these “experts,” we’re left with the play’s big truth: the one thing that makes someone an AIDS expert is a willingness to take risks to show love; everything else is just faking it. And the only real experts here are Adam and Eddie.
Michael Barto captures both Adam’s edgy anger and his compulsion to take out on others his unacknowledged fears. It’s a role that can cut Adam off from everyone around him; fortunately Barto fights the urge to play it alone, particularly in Adam’s scenes with Eddie. Ron Wells drives home Eddie’s very rational panic but he could work harder to contrast his growing anger with the depletion that gradually consumes him.
