UNFINISHED BUSINESS: THE AIDS SHOW
Something similar happened to Wayne Buidens, artistic director of Forest Park’s Circle Theatre and director of its production of Unfinished Business: The AIDS Show, currently running in Chicago at the Project. Buidens saw Unfinished Business in its Chicago premiere at Bailiwick in 1987, was taken with the work, and later contacted Leland Moss, the principal author and original director, for rights to the show. Moss, a San Franciscan, agreed. When Buidens finally got around to preparing his production this spring, he put in a few calls to Moss’s San Francisco phone number and left messages. When his calls were not returned, he contacted some other west coast theater people, who informed Buidens that Moss had died in January of this year.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“Day after day after day after day”–to use the lyric of Stephen Sondheim’s song “Not a Day Goes By,” which opens and closes Unfinished Business–the AIDS epidemic is with us. Just when things seem to have calmed down, there’s a new explosion from the front: somebody else important and surprising dies; word of some new medical breakthrough is heralded and then retracted; some unnerving new development is reported. Last week, when this production opened, confusing evidence that a dentist with AIDS had transmitted the syndrome to one of his patients was coming to light, evidence that seemed to contradict previous assumptions about how HIV is spread.
Perhaps this explains the relatively restrained handling of material concerning “sharing needles with drag queens,” “rimming at the baths,” “sitting on [another man’s] fist,” and other unsafe habits. “I like to do pot and do poppers and get drunk and have sex with strangers. I guess that makes me old-fashioned, but that’s what I like!” whines Tim Clifford as a man for whom “party” now means an evening of Trivial Pursuit and pizza. But the line lacks any resonance, not because Clifford’s an inexperienced actor (though he is) but because he seems to lack any personal connection with the statement (which, of course, is just as well for him).
