SOUL SURVIVOR
The final installment of Bailiwick Repertory’s Gay & Lesbian Series (the earlier offerings were Robert Chesley’s Jerker and Holly Hughes’s The Well of Horniness), Soul Survivor was picked–hastily–as a replacement for Harvey Fierstein’s Forget Him because Bailiwick could not afford the rights to it.
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But Bailiwick can afford even less to dumb down their stage and audiences to the level of Bruno’s bargain-basement theater. This is a play that throws together great chunks from Blithe Spirit, after surgically removing Noel Coward’s wit and charm. It then slaps them on top of A Christmas Carol, and finally grafts the mess onto more-honest treatments of the AIDS crisis like As Is and An Early Frost. The mutant result, as one character says in another context, is “metaphysical bullshit.”
Improbably, Mark runs off so that Jerry can soliloquize (always a sure sign of desperate play writing) about how much he wishes Brian were still around. That’s no sooner said than–who’d have thought it?–the dead lover bursts from the wings and strikes a burlesque pose.
Indeed, it’s in its approach to death that Soul Survivor becomes a real tissue of lies. When Jerry screams at Brian, “Why did you leave me?” Bruno never thinks to have Brian say that, far from leaving, he was there to the bitter end–when he “left” against his will. (Blaming the nonsurvivor is always the scuzziest way out of dealing with survivor guilt.) When Jerry mentions AIDS, phantom Brian smugly says he’s over that: “I am perfect now.” It’s a strange and barren comfort to learn that the cure for AIDS is death, that a know-it-all ghost can come back and taunt the living with his “perfection.”
