The New York Times - November 17, 1986
John J. O'Connor

When Mr. Epstein and Mr. Adair set out last year to do a straightforward documentary about the disease and its consequences in San Francisco - described as containing a "community of 70,000 gay men" - a friend suggested they go to see a stage production being done by a kind of "guerrilla group" called Theater Rhinoceros. The film makers ended up combining scenes from that production, called "The AIDS Show," with offstage interviews featuring several of the group's members, all placed in the larger context of the city itself. The result is a complex production, often deeply moving, sometimes very funny, that gets away from the sanitizing "objectivity" of a news report or panel discussion.

The reactions of audiences are as important as the play. The sketches range from a nurse wondering in her helpless rage and grief how certain homosexuals can continue being sexually promiscuous to a shattered mother who learns of her son's homosexuality when he appears on a public-television show. One man sits and grieves alone for his dead lover. Another recalls a victim who refused to assume a forced nobility, eschewing a dignified death with the "voracious kind of self-pity that's usually reserved for homeowners who've lost their belongings in mudslides."

In one of the more affecting interviews, Douglas Holsclaw, co-director with Leland Moss of the theater group, recalls a friend who died of the disease in New York in 1981, before it had been properly diagnosed. Despite all of his ailments, he kept coming to work, and his friends sometimes made fun of him for being so prone to illness. Neither he nor they realized that he had a terminal disease.

"The AIDS Show" got under way in 1984, initiated by Allan Estes, who died of AIDS before the production was completed. In 1985, the play was updated, its name changed to "Unfinished Business." The disease had progressed beyond being "a mysterious menace," and the emphasis of the production was shifted to learning to cope. First, it's noted, the community was gripped by fear, "but slowly realized that there were resources of support and comfort."

With a minimum of heavy-handed sentimentality or theatrics, the documentary does manage to convey its message of survival clearly. Insisting that "we are going to make it," the performers end the show singing Stephen Sondheim's "Not a Day Goes By." The disease remains a horror, but it seems that a significant corner has been turned in dealing with it.

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