Asking Who Is Innocent

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: PATIENT A

AUTHOR: LEE BLESSING

WHERE: OFF-BROADWAY

THE BOTTOM LINE: America's most imaginative playwright on public issues rethinks the Kimberly Bergalis AIDS case.

Most American playwrights seem obsessed with the hearth and its heartaches, but Lee Blessing takes on big political questions, finding the human dimension without stinting the abstraction. Since his 1987 breakthrough work, A Walk in the Woods, about nuclear arms control, he has tackled Beirut hostage taking (Two Rooms), the Gulf War (Fortinbras), Central American insurrection (Lake Street Extension), racism in sport (Cobb), crime and the media (Down the Road) and now AIDS. His appetite for moral complexity has never been more challenged, and his capacity to avoid settling for mere indignation has never been more welcome, than in Patient A, a fresh look at one of the few public topics that American dramatists have thoroughly, indeed relentlessly, explored.

As a white, heterosexual, female virgin who never used intravenous drugs and was infected during dental treatment, Kimberly Bergalis was all but universally termed an "innocent" victim of AIDS. To gay men with AIDS, however, this locution was profoundly upsetting: it implied that they were "guilty" and deserved their doom. Many felt that the Bergalis family let itself be used by hatemongers and that Kimberly's plea for universal testing of health-care workers would wrongly shift emphasis to safeguarding the "innocent" mainstream instead of finding a cure.

Although Blessing's play was commissioned by the Bergalis family, it fully explores this conflict. It also engages the literary question of how to tell a story, which means pondering what the story really is. One character is Kimberly, beguilingly played by Robin Morse. Another is a generic gay man (Richard Bekins), one of thousands whose death attracted far less attention than the five traceable to health-care errors, all by the same dentist. In a pivotal outburst, the third character (Jon DeVries), representing the playwright, recalls his brother's death in an auto accident before seat belts were standard. Technology that would have saved him had been developed, but the public was not yet ready for it to be imposed. Thus Blessing grasps the nettlesome underlying issue: in a society that says human life is infinitely precious but patently does not mean it, how many deaths are enough to command change in public policy?