Theatre in Review: Love + Science (City Center Stage II) "It's the 80s. It's the best time in the history of humanity to be gay." That line, which gets a bitter, knowing laugh at City Center Stage II, is spoken by Jeff, a young doctor, to Matt, his colleague and boyfriend. Well, sort-of boyfriend; their budding romance will be thwarted by HIV, which sends their lives spinning in different directions. The title of David J. Glass' new play is strictly truthful; Love + Science hitches together personal drama with a potted history of the AIDS epidemic, focusing on the search for viable treatments. It's an odd, ungainly hybrid of straightforward romance and virus-hunting drama. And it isn't terribly original: Glass aims to blaze a trail already explored by Tony Kushner, Larry Kramer, and William Hoffman without having anything fresh to add. Jeff and Matt, medical students at Columbia, meet on the day of their white coat ceremony in 1981. The attraction is mutual although Matt is cagey about his sexual orientation. Indeed, he seems borderline ambivalent, so it's a surprise to learn that he has had a storied (and underage) career as a Studio 54 busboy; this revelation cues a cameo by Steve Rubell, fresh out of prison and not looking at all well, although he smirkingly asks Matt, "Is it true Mick Jagger went down on you in the VIP room? Because that's what he told me." Whatever happened under the mirror balls with Mick, Matt is now all about science, or so he insists; then again, his vow of platonic friendship with Jeff lasts about a minute and a half. Still, a couple of hot nights under the sheets does not a love affair make, and once the news gets around that something is mysteriously killing off young gay men, Matt -- who, in addition to his studies, serves as a lab assistant, doing viral research -- buries himself in his work, growing lonelier and sadder with the years. By contrast, Jeff, also a researcher, joins Act Up, remaining vibrantly alive and bent on convincing Matt that it is, after all, safe to kiss. Love + Science hits all the discordant notes of the early epidemic years: the crackpot causal theories, the terror of even routine physical contact, the not-so-hidden suggestions that gay men were finally getting their comeuppance, and the furious political pushback that ultimately transformed pharmaceutical research. But this is an oft-told tale, and Glass' dramaturgy is scattered, unable to identify a unifying throughline. At times, it evokes the confusion and tumult of the early '80s; at other times, it gets stuck on Jeff and Matt's dating problems. It's putting it mildly to say that these are not of equal import. With his scarlet past and anxious present, Matt is a complex character who needs much more investigation than he gets here. (Even so, he is better off than Jeff, who has no backstory at all.) As it skips through the years, tracking Matt and his locked-up heart into the COVID era, the story degenerates into a mass of dangling plot threads, arriving at a final scene that is little more than a shrug. If Allen MacLeod's direction never builds much momentum, it is surely due in part to the unwieldy script. Similarly, some actors come off better than others. Matt Walker, relying heavily on monotone line readings, struggles to make sense of Matt, whose sex- and love-averse nature is never fully explored. As Jeff, Jonathan Burke's natural charisma and comic timing are solid assets. But neither actor can fill in the enormous blanks left by the playwright. The always-delightful Thursday Farrar staunchly delivers plenty of expository information as a researcher hot on the trail of the retrovirus. Adrian David Greensmith is touching as an AIDS patient left in the dark by his doctors, as is Ryan Knowles as Matt's former boyfriend, a nightclub doorman, brought low by illness. Tally Sessions comes and goes in various roles, most notably as Rubell and a pontificating doctor positing idiotic ideas about viral transmission. The show is neatly stolen by Imani Pearl Williams as two very different women, both of whom put a crimp in Matt's plans to take up heterosexual dating. (One of them charmingly uses the force of logic; the other tears him to shreds.) Zoe Hurwitz's set design is dominated by a white frosted upstage wall behind which a set of LED tubes (or, possibly, panels) creates various pixel-mapped backgrounds, including a triple X logo and a strand of DNA, courtesy of lighting and projection designer Samuel J. Biondolillo. It's a reasonably effective way of keeping track of changing times. Jane Shaw's sound design includes an often-nightmarish collage of talking heads, including Ronald Reagan, Tom Brokaw, and others, weighing in, often ignorantly, on the epidemic and the gay community. Camilla Daly's costumes are not overly suggestive of the 1980s. Well, it's Pride Month, and Love + Science is better than the usual gaysploitation drama, the sole aim of which is to get the leading men's shirts off as quickly as possible. And it may provide a useful history lesson to younger audiences. But Angels in America, As Is, The Destiny of Me, and The Normal Heart are hardly obscure works; each illuminates a different aspect of that terrible era, and anyone interested should start with them. --David Barbour 
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