The Way We Live Now: American Plays and the AIDS Crisis (review)

Book Reviews 171 waves, or their absence. Beyond this Uteral interpretation, Mukand wants readers to recognize that the narrative of medicine, whether in the form of lines of poetry, stories, or cUnical tales, is essential to the understanding of iUness. The goal of medicine, he suggests, is to "empower patients and their families" (p. xxvii); by helping patients and famiUes become aware of their own stories, the goal may be accompüshed. Narrative is basic, a vital component of the practice of medicine. Yet, all too often, the narratives of medicine are obscured by the technical language and the rush to diagnostic tests. Without such narratives, would healing occur? Would empathy be possible? Vital Lines offers a very rich experience to all readers. For anyone who teaches humanities (or the art of medicine) to medical students and residents, this collection is a gift. It can readily be integrated with other materials as a basic text. It can also be combined with Mukand's anthology of poetry, Sutured Words, for a comprehensive course on contemporary Uterature and medicine. —JuUa E. Connelly University of Virginia M. EUzabeth Osborn, ed., The Way We Live Now: American Plays and the AIDS Crisis. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1990. xvii + 282 pp. Clothbound, $24.95; paperback, $14.95. "Place: New York City" With the largest number of AIDS cases of any city in the world, New York occupies a unique place in the medical, social, and cultural history of this pandemic. Almost all of the ten plays anthologized here were first performed on and off Broadway between 1985 and 1990. They bear witness to the city's involvement in the health crisis and to its theaters ' efforts to inform and mobiUze the public through entertainment. Not surprisingly, they feature a large number of writers and poets, actors and actresses, in and out of work in the city. They assume their audience's familiarity with the city's landmarks, from Tribeca to the Upper West Side to St. Vincent's Hospital. Terrence McNally's Andre's Mother (1988) brings together four people who loved Andre and commemorate his Ufe by 172 BOOK REVIEWS releasing balloons in Central Park, not far from the outdoor theater. (This original version lasts eight minutes; expanded into a teleplay, it was performed on "American Playhouse" in 1990.) The name of the New York soccer team, the Cosmos, provides one reading for the ambiguous title of Lanford Wilson's A Poster of the Cosmos (1988). These plays express some New Yorkers' anger with the official denials of a crisis during Reagan's presidency and the personal hypocrisy of a Roy Cohn. The latter appears in the single scene printed here from Tony Kushner's Angels in America, "an epic work in two parts" yet to be produced. Cohn denies to his doctor that he is homosexual in these terms: "Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout. Does this sound like me, Henry?" (p. 134). In these plays, desire and disease couple and separate men and men, men and women, Anglos and Latinos, Catholics and Jews, intellectuals and manual laborers, the well and the sick, healers and victims in the anonymity of leather bars, in the overfurnished homes of the upper middle class, and in hospitals. But while social barriers fall, the city's medical, housing, and police services collapse in ruins. The value of these plays to our understanding of AIDS's impact on the imagination lies, in large part, in their apocalyptic vision, as well as in their probing of the mutual attraction of love and death. In Harry Kondoleon's Zero Positive (1987; first performed in 1988), two persons with AIDS (PWAs), a suicidal actor, a senile man, and two neurotics perform Athens in Ruins, a play in which Athens's defeat in the Peloponnesian War brings on pestilence and madness, destroys friendship, family ties, and piety, and confronts the audience with skulls, bones, and funeral flowers. While not without a sense of self-parody, such moments connect this plague in New York with Thucydides' and Lucretius' Athens, Boccaccio 's Florence, and Defoe's London. William M. Hoffman's As is, the ear...