FLESH AND BLOOD
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Allan is a reckless 17-year-old who boozes and tokes as if he doesn’t think he’ll turn 20. Sex, which he has with a lot of women, makes up for what he believes life has denied him. Allan’s one anchor is his older brother Jim, a 26-year-old gay man who is in every other way a very straight arrow. For years Jim has made up for the failures of a dysfunctional father and rigidly fundamentalist mother, setting examples they wouldn’t, even urging Allan to wear condoms, no matter how funny they feel. The cocky, I’m-gonna-live-forever Allan offers practically every excuse for not using them.
The biggest argument for condoms comes from Jim himself, who now confronts full-blown AIDS. He delays telling Allan, partly because he wants to spare him one more ordeal, but mainly because he feels guilty about being gay. (He even wonders whether he deserves AIDS.) For Allan the only question is the scary one: “How could you kill yourself?” “Because we just didn’t know,” Jim replies. Allan has no such excuse.
Jamie Denton’s sympathetic Ralph shows great sensitivity to Jim’s volatile mood swings. Though their love scene late in the play is not in the script, it not only parallels the steamy one between Allan and Sherri-Lee but also shows how much Jim has overcome his fear of sex. Katie Walsh plays the protofeminist Sherri-Lee with sharp attention to detail.
