Four years after his Love Diatribe opened in 1990 in New York, playwright/novelist Harry Kondoleon was dead of AIDS at age 39. In his later years this author of 17 plays and two novels made the horror of AIDS a central theme of his work. Love Changes Everything was the headline The New York Times put on its review of the play, and indeed it magically does in the final moments of The Necessary Theater's production. Kondoleon's wishful, wistful thinking that love has the power to heal even the most severe imperfections and pain in human lives in this "loveless crucified world" is in full flower here.
A mysterious stranger who calls herself Frieda (Eryn Joslyn) and can call up any accent to pose as a foreign exchange student enters and, as if by waving a fairy wand, transforms the lives of a highly dysfunctional family and its equally mixed-up next door neighbors. "Happiness is available on demand to the hearty," Frieda declares.
Screwball situations and dark comedy abound. Son Orin (Mark Forman), a librarian whose girlfriend accidentally overdosed and died, shows up for a dinner to which his parents had invited him. They aren't at home and have obviously forgotten. But his sister Sandy (Carrie Vessel), who has left her nutritionist husband after six months of marriage, is there, having moved back home to act as if she's "11 again with a perfect lack of freedom." "If you don't love someone sufficiently, you're killing them," Sandy says, explaining why she left her husband. "We're emotionally retarded," Orin cries. "There must be something besides endless psychotherapy...I'm sick of me."
Enter meddling neighbor Mrs. Anderson (Susan Linville), who drops in umpteen times a day to bring food or gossip and lament the AIDS death of her son Nemo, to whom Orin was cruel and rejecting after Nemo got in "a homosexual tizzy" over him. She is soon followed by Orin and Sandy's parents -- Dennis (Tad Chitwood), a blustering hypochondriac who takes lots of sitz baths and complains about the welfare state, and Gerry (Laurene Scalf), a constantly fatigued and cynical nurse who showers more time and attention on her patients than she does on her family. Next we learn that Sandy has embarked on an affair with Nemo's stolid, slow-witted brother Mike (Andrew Pyle). Now it's time for Frieda to intervene. The wonder-working words "I love you" come tumbling out with the aid of a tea potion that she brews and dispenses. The healing words are embraced and chanted happily by all as the play ends rosily and everything gets sorted out.
The Necessary Theatre, which presented Kondoleon's The Vampires in 1998, has mounted an intriguing production with a strong cast of regulars: Chitwood, Linville, Forman, and Scalf and newcomers Vessel, Joslyn, and Pyle. It's a bit of a shock to see the attractive Linville transformed into the dowdy, on-the-verge-of-hysterics Mrs. Anderson, who wears too much rouge, tacky clothes, and a hideous wig. But Linville manages to turn this needy obnoxious character into one that eventually arouses sympathy.
