KILLING GAME
The symptoms of the plague that is sweeping through the town include swelling and spots (Kaposi’s sarcoma?), and there’s no cure. The deaths are increasing in a “geometrical progression,” and there’s talk of placing all potential carriers in quarantine. Many people believe they belong to a group that will be unaffected by the plague, but the disease keeps dashing such hopes by infecting everyone — rich or poor, male or female, educated or ignorant, virtuous or corrupt. The dialogue contains many comments that sound like thinly disguised references to AIDS. In one scene, a citizen learns that an acquaintance, “a fine-looking specimen . . . who takes the same precautions I do,” has just died. “Then I am going to die too . . . unless there’s a miracle,” she concludes. Another character wonders if the plague is some sort of divine punishment. An activist asserts that “this death epidemic is political!” and a politician actually tries to use the plague to build a constituency. A doctor insists that the rules set forth by the medical association will prevent death.
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There’s just one problem — apparently this interpretation, as obvious as it may be, has not occurred to anyone at the Alliance Theatre. K.C. Helmeid’s direction makes no allusion to AIDS whatsoever. It would have been so easy to make the connection, starting with the very first scene. A man is pushing a baby carriage in the park with a male friend. They decide to go get a drink, and leave the carriage with a woman friend, who notices that the twins inside are dead. If these two men were portrayed as homosexuals going off for “a drink,” Helmeid would have conjured the specter of AIDS, hinted at the disease’s spread into the heterosexual population, and placed a horrifying new meaning on all the deaths that follow. Other characters could have been portrayed as heroin addicts or even as hapless victims of the disease.
