AIDS has not disappeared. It sits behind a curtain made up of time, forgetfulness and life extending drugs. It’s lost all of its urgency and settled into treatable ever present danger mode.
It wasn’t always like that and in the play, Roz and Ray, currently running at Victory Gardens Theater; the full scope of the disease’s once swift and unrelenting fatality flares hot with its old intensity.
Using her father’s experience as a physician treating hemophiliac patients in the midst of the epidemics peak during the 80’s, playwright Karen Hartman recalls the tragic impact AIDS had on the parents and physicians of children.
Reliving those dark days during the play’s one act performance was difficult. Framed from the perspective of a father whose twin hemophiliac sons are caught in a net of draconian medical bureaucracy, woefully inadequate knowledge of the disease and a cynical profit hungry pharmaceutical industry; the anger and anguish the disease once created exploded into life again.
Roz, the boys’ pediatrician, develops a close relationship with their father. The depth of the doctor/parent intimacy challenges the imagination but the poignancy of the boys’ circumstances does not. The reality is that in the late 70’s through the mid 80’s nearly half of the hemophiliacs in this country became infected with AIDS through a contaminated blood supply. Roz and Ray tells the story of those people; the ones who don’t come to mind when you hear that word: AIDS.
On the evening of this viewing, the two characters, James Vincent Meredith as Ray and Mary Beth Fisher as Dr. Roz Kagan took some time to fall in sync and escape into the illusion of the story. Once they did however, things got much more real. The audience felt the frustration of a grieving father and understood his feelings of betrayal by a person and a system. It also felt the exasperation of a doctor hamstrung by protocol and hounded by guilt.
Victory Gardens Theater
2433 N. Lincoln
11/11/16 – 12/11/16