'Lazarus Syndrome': Code Blue, Stat

By Nelson Pressley
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Irony rears its head at Theater Alliance, where a new play called "Lazarus Syndrome" unwittingly lives up to its title. The cliche-riddled show is all but dead when (voila!) it snaps to life at the end of its 70 minutes.

That's too late, unfortunately, for Bruce Ward's earnest, sentimental tale about Elliott, a man living with HIV and coping with the brand of survivor guilt referred to in the title. The script drowns its characters in glib dialogue and threatens the audience with death by banter.

Yet the performance is cool as can be, thanks primarily to Michael Kramer's cleareyed turn as Elliott. The character's a dreadful sad sack; a gifted pianist who no longer plays, he's a comparatively healthy man who can't get out of his bathrobe, even as his brother and father arrive to jauntily snap him out of a mysterious funk.

Ward's script skips along the surface of Elliott's condition, and director Paul Douglas Michnewicz paces it like a situation comedy. What else can you do when the Jewish Elliott and his goyish chorus-boy partner (shortly off to play a Cossack in a "Fiddler on the Roof" tour) trade lovers' barbs over the morning obits? And when brother Neil joshes and father Jake cajoles as they oh-so-gently prod Elliott toward the recognition that something isn't right?

Somehow Kramer remains unforced and grounded, which is practically heroic when everything around him is so stridently cute. Well, almost everything: Dan Conway's urban apartment set is handsome and intensely realistic, right down to the recessed lighting in the ceiling (courtesy of designer Dan Covey).

And even if Kevin Boggs is hopelessly generic as the chorus boy and Jim Jorgensen's a trifle too bright-eyed as Neil, at least the actors generally soft-pedal the material. Bill Hamlin is especially deft as a father so tradition-minded that he helps conjure up a table full of comfort food.

That's the show's lone moment of well-executed whimsy. And it's about then that you detect the trick up the playwright's sleeve -- if, that is, you didn't begin to suspect earlier, when the lights dimmed portentously as Elliott considered the phrase "Time doesn't stand still, you know." The plot device is awfully gimmicky, but at least it finally widens the theme appreciably. It gets to what's on Ward's mind in a way that the pesky-perky dialogue almost never does.