San Francisco Chronicle (SF); Thursday, November 14, 1991
Steven Winn, Chronicle Staff Critic

After turning up in a gloomy school auditorium ("Screenplay"), a sleek Financial District office tower ("The Bug"), an outdoor amphitheater ("By Chance Almost a Woman: Elizabeth") and occasionally in ordinary theater spaces, the Z's have encamped at The Gazebo, a lounge in the Davies Medical Center's HIV Institute, for their latest endeavor. The play is Larry Kramer's "Just Say No," a willfully outrageous 1988 political farce that lets the administrations of Ronald Reagan and New York Mayor Edward Koch have it for hypocrisy and foot-dragging in the AIDS crisis.

If the sting of Kramer's made-at-the- moment barbs has inevitably dulled some, with Reagan and Koch out of office, the very existence of this HIV lounge, with its sweeping vista of San Francisco, underscores Kramer's rage. AIDS is a medical catastrophe that implicates at every level, from the peaks of power to the schools, churches, local governments and other institutions of public life. No reminder of that fact, in Kramer's reckoning, can be too insistent or rude.

CAUSES A FUSS

And rudeness, for Kramer, has never been a problem. As he did in "The Normal Heart," his caustic 1985 AIDS play, the playwright rants, taunts and generally kicks up a royal fuss onstage.

"Just Say No" is set in the Georgetown apartment of a semi-closeted gay social climber (David Dower as Foppy Schwartz) who pimps for the First Lady (an icy Jane Angeles as Mrs. Potentate) and the randy Mayor of "Appleburg" (Stanley Goldstein). With both of those panting presences installed in separate bedrooms awaiting delivery, Foppy has to deal with a handful of other unexpected guests.

Rick Hickman's Junior is the First Family's gay ballet dancer son in jockey shorts (remember the Vanity Fair spread?), blabbing about sex with the Secret Servicemen and eyeing the Mayor's ex-trick Gilbert Perch (Michael Racela). Joe Weatherby plays a depraved department store titan and Nancy Lee Russell his conspiracy theorist girlfriend in black leather. Black maid Diane Amos is an anachronistic Eustaica Vye, a back-talking vox populi who documents "Daddy's" (Reagan's) failings on a host of social issues.

"Getting shot," by her account, "is the best thing Daddy ever did."

COMEDY OF INSULT

The plot hinges, with lots of creaking, on a pornographic videotape that supposedly sullies high- level cabinet officials and other big players. Kramer isn't particularly skillful at complicating the cross fire among the various players, but this is, after all, a comedy of insult and ridicule rather than finesse.

The charges escalate from the snippy (Daddy's upset when his library burns -- both books were destroyed) to the feverishly inflamed. In its fantastic apotheosis, "Just Say No" paints the president and his wife as monsters of hypocrisy who used sex to advance their own careers, only to turn their backs on homosexuals victimized by the disease.

Director John Balma's cast plays it all with vigor, high spirits and a kind of earnestness that drives the evening along even when Kramer's script flags under all the fulminations. Foppy's breakthrough of conscience supplies the show's cobbled-up conclusion.

DATED MATERIAL

Comedy of this type, which can't possibly keep up with the rush of new events and new sources of outrage, wear-dates quickly. A good deal of the material plays as recycled sludge, from a Bittburg slur to Irangate to Mrs. Potentate's sulk about the public's preference for Jackie Kennedy.

At times, though, Kramer gets off a keeper: "I put that lousy actor into office," fumes the department store power broker Harold Harrod, "and he learns how to act."

"Just Say No" plays Fridays through Mondays through December 23 at Davies Medical Center. Reservations (666-2317) are required.

CAPTION: PHOTO Michael Racela, Jane Angeles and Rick Hickman spoof Nancy Reagan in 'Just Say No,' at The Gazebo, a lounge in the Davies Medical Center

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