THE BRIDE WHO IS A STRANGER
Anyone who goes to see it hoping for an easily accessible dramatic exploration of the AIDS crisis and its social ramifications will be sorely disappointed. The Bride Who Is a Stranger is not that kind of work. And it’s clear that directors Justin Hayford and Audrey Heller never intended it to be.
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As in a dream, every element, every action, every event represents something else. Hence, the solemn young man handing out calling cards stands for, among other things, (1) the neo-Victorian formality of AIDS-era relationships, (2) the spread of the AIDS virus itself, and (3) the pathetic attempts of the terminally ill to find a meaningful way to say good-bye to those they love. Similarly, the bride who (finally) appears in the second act represents (1) a woman dying of the same disease that killed her lover, (2) a corpse being prepared for a funeral, and (3) the Angel of Death preparing to marry, which is to say carry away, her dying lover.
This same scientist (played with comic brilliance by Philip R. Smith) dominates the first act, conducting trial after trial of his absurd experiments, which only succeed in proving the dehumanizing stupidity of scientific research. In one experiment the scientist tries to describe a dancer’s improvised dance as it’s being created so accurately that a second dancer can imitate it exactly. In another experiment, the scientist creates his own version of Simon Says by forcing three subjects, a man and two women, to step up or down a small stepladder on command.
Ultimately, The Bride Who Is a Stranger proves to be as obscure and baffling as any stranger’s dream. And understandably so. The issues and questions that Hayford and Heller deal with–how to live, how to love, how to die in a time of plagues–are so broad, so personal, so highly charged, so fundamentally unanswerable, that no more conventional form could have contained them.
