Playwright: Austin Pendleton. At: Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company at Angel Island, 731 W. Sheridan Rd. Tickets: 773-871-0442; www.maryarrchie.com; $15-$25. Runs through: July 21
Plays incorporating AIDS into their plots during the 1990s typically portrayed the then-incurable disease as a tragically unforeseen calamity, but a helluva way to bring families together. AIDS viewed as a weaponto be used in the destruction of others, or oneselfwas strictly the stuff of urban legend and paranoid fantasy. So when Austin Pendleton proposed a pair of antisocial curmudgeons who see in the deadly virus a resolution to their existential anger, audiences were caught with their hankies dry and useless.
Our title character is a writer of mediocre novels, now living in seclusion, ranting at his estranged would-be comforters under guise of recording his memoirs. A target of inflated expectations, Bob's guilt over the undeserved admiration of his kin has rendered him determined to prove his unworthiness by dying as ignobly as he declares he has lived. Despite his heterosexual devotion to his rejected wife, he has made a practice of having unprotected sex with AIDS-infected gay hustlers, leading to his own contraction of the fatal infection.
What he doesn't anticipate is that his carefully crafted martyrdom will meet with equally matched opposition in the form of his nephew, Josh, a slacker in his late teens already as peevish and nihilistic as his uncle, and whose reverence for life is no less cavalier. (He arrives after having crashed the fourth of the Porsches given him by his doting father.) Bob's philosophical auto-excruciation does not impress the youth whose care of the afflicted does not include sympathy. "You took it up the ass in the middle of an epidemic!" he jeers, "Your death isn't meaningless, Bobit's stupid! That's the opposite of meaningless!"
If this dynamic is to work, the characters' courtship of the Grim Reaper must be clearly discernible as the petulant ruse that it is. What sabotaged the play's premiere in 1995 was Steppenwolf's insistence on playing both men as pasty-faced wraiths, when the vigor with which they debate the validity of self-orchestrated final-days scenarios belies their professed eagerness to shuffle off their mortal coils ("You don't know how precious time is until you waste it!" snaps Josh at one point). Mary-Arrchie Theatre director Cody Estle wisely stays out of the way, however, allowing Richard Cotovsky and Rudy Galvan to swap Pendleton's irony-laced repartee with a wryly affectionate chemistry highlighting the egotism and absurdity in welcoming the waning of the light solely in order to rage against it.