(L-R): Alex Cranmer as Thomas, Tim Spears as Anthony and Paula Langton as Doctor Chapman. Credit: Stan Barouh
David Rabe's A Question of Mercy is an excellent one-act play unfortunately inflated by two superfluous characters and uninformative monologues. But it is graced by the superb performance of Tim Spears as the AIDS-ridden Anthony, who infuses this overlong production with verve and heart.
The play, based on a journal by the writer and surgeon Dr. Richard Seltzer, begins in January 1990 when Thomas (Alex Cranmer) enlists Dr. Roberta Chapman (Paula Langton), a surgeon undergoing a crisis of faith about her medical vocation, to "help" Anthony, his lover of a decade -- by which he means, of course, will she assist Anthony in his effort to kill himself and so end his considerable pain?
She agrees, but not immediately, and not, at first, to "help" Anthony beyond the proper technique of taking the dozens of barbiturate pills he has had sent to him from his native Colombia. Gradually, however, as she comes to know him, and as he insists on knowing her, she agrees to administer a fatal dose of morphine if the pills do not do their work.
Chapman's journey from reluctance to engagement forms the narrative arc of the play and underlines the play's intent, which director Jim Petosa states in his program notes as provoking "conversations and musings" about how little "our culture has moved...in terms of dealing with so-called 'end of life issues.'"
There is that in the play, but there is also more that turns out to be dramatically less.
Rabe introduces two characters who do little to forward the dramatic action. Eddie (Mathew Nakitare), the doorman to the building where Anthony and Thomas live, serves only as a means to provoke fear later in the play that Chapman will be arrested for her involvement in the scheme because he has seen her enter and leave the building. Susanah (Martha Newman), a friend of Anthony and Thomas, arrives relatively late in the play (she is never mentioned beforehand). She is supposed to apply some sort of chilly voice of reason to the carrying-out of the assisted suicide, but her motivations are unclear and her presence distracts from the play's central moral struggle.
Mr. Rabe also loads the play with monologues, most of them given by Dr. Chapman, which don't add any special depth to the characters or their actions and too often give exposition or explanation that would be better revealed through the dramatic conflict. They stop the play's flow without any compensatory pleasures for the layover.
Mr. Spears, though, carries the show with his performance. He expertly shows how painful Anthony's pain is, how it corrodes both body and spirit. He makes credible the conundrum that the search for release is not a giving-up on a life which Anthony loves but a way of honoring its power and worth. His suicide is a celebration.
And his performance also shows how insufficient the responses are from the living as they face his absence and choice. Anthony is the only character in the play that comes away with his dignity intact and his mind clear. The rest remain bundled up in the pettiness of the daily continuing-on.
Scenic designers Christina Galvez and Eleanor Kahn have devised a spare set with easily moved modular furniture pieces. Upstage entrances are made through white curtains snapped open and closed by stagehands dressed in scrubs, as if to say the whole world is a hospital and we are all patients in some state of decomposition. Hallie Zieselman's lighting efficiently marks the shifts in scene and time, and sound designer Andrew Duncan Will selects simple instrumental music for underscoring and transition, though Mr. Petosa too often uses the music for emotional cues rather than relying upon the actors to do that work.
The play's conclusion doesn't leave us any the wiser about the issues at hand, but because of the play's dramatic slackness, its ambivalences weary rather than provoke us. Tim Spears, though, definitely makes A Question of Mercy worth a visit to Atlantic Stage 2.
(July 2010)