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Black Family Anguish
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19806 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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5 / 1991 |
1,751 Words |
| Author
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Michael Marshall
Michael Marshall is executive editor of THE WORLD & I. |
Before It Hits Home is a play about AIDS--another play about AIDS. Forgive this reviewer for being less than totally enthusiastic about seeing it. Death is an ever present source of human drama. Each year, tens of thousands of lives reach an untimely end, from cancer, heart disease, or drunk drivers, among other causes, leaving families and friends to cope with the loss and try to give it meaning.
These tragedies do not garner a fraction of the attention that have been orchestrated for the AIDS epidemic and do not have myriad plays written about them, all of which leaves me with little patience for agitprop productions seeking to browbeat their audiences into "politically correct" attitudes toward AIDS and homosexuality. Mercifully, Cheryl West has not written such a piece. What she has done is create an emotionally powerful, if uneven, play about the impact of AIDS on one black family.
Wendal (Michael Jayce) is a bisexual jazz musician (a haunting saxophone solo opens the play) who realizes, after much resistance, that his chronic chest condition--"it's just a cough"--is a lot more. He has AIDS and has to confront his partners with this chilling news. Douglass (Keith Randolph Smith), his male lover, married with children, he manages to tell, but he cannot spit out the words to Simone (Cynthia Martells), the woman he loves, lives with, and, it is hinted, was ready to settle down with. (Would he then have given up Douglass with a secret life, an unknown threat to his family? West does not tell us.)
Seriously ill and dispirited, Wendal is drawn back home. Though it is clear that, quite apart form AIDS, he has been the prodigal son, he hopes to find his last comfort with his parents and his son, Dwayne. The play's climax revolves around the family's reaction to his affliction.
West has written five plays since 1987, and with this one is on the verge of achieving national recognition. All of her plays deal with social issues--teen-age pregnancy, drugs--in the black community and attitudes toward them. In that sense it is socially committed drama, but West avoids preaching. Some of her source material clearly comes out of her fifteen years of work in social services in Illinois, which included a stint counseling people awaiting HIV tests. Yet the result is not simply a documentary collection of facts and attitudes. She displays a dramatic touch that, though sometimes unsure, is the sign of a real playwright.
In interviews West has
...
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