San Francisco Chronicle - October 4, 2007
Robert Hurwitt, rhurwitt@sfchronicle.com.

In "Holding the Man," the Australian play receiving its American premiere at the New Conservatory Theatre Center, the drama is personal, the personal is political and everything is eminently theatrical. Tommy Murphy's play adapts a longtime best-selling memoir by Timothy Conigrave, an Australian actor and playwright who died of AIDS in 1995.

Director Matthew Graham Smith hasn't done the play full justice in the NCTC production that opened Saturday. The strained, wobbly and bothersomely artificial Australian accents are not only continually distracting but even opaque at times, and that's just the most obvious of the show's problems. But the meta- theatrical nature of Murphy's script is innately forgiving of staging missteps, and Graham and his actors capture a great deal of the comic, provocative and deeply affecting aspects that have made the play a hit during two seasons for Sydney's Griffin Theatre Company (it transferred to the Sydney Opera House in May).

Like the book - published shortly after Conigrave's death and only now coming out in America, as the inaugural publication from Cuttyhunk Books - the play traces the 15-year love of Conigrave and John Caleo, from high school first passion to their deaths a few years apart. It's a story of mutual discovery, in almost Edenic innocence among fairly supportive friends in Melbourne (the play doesn't get into much of the knee-jerk adolescent homophobia of the early part of the memoir), and of near-Homeric loyalty, at least on John's part (the characters are identified by their first names) as Tim proves congenitally unfaithful.

It's also to some extent the story of Australia in the '70s and '80s, and of the early years of the AIDS pandemic - both men contracted HIV before the virus was identified. And it's inherently a theater story, as Tim moves to Sydney to study acting, joins the Griffin company and develops Australia's first AIDS play, "Soft Targets."

The theater content allows Murphy (and Smith) to exploit an openly theatrical approach, with patently phony wigs and four actors sketching all the supporting roles in Prem Lathi's representative, quick-change costumes. Scenes switch rapidly from intimate realism to stylized acting exercises, sometimes overlapping on the crude platforms and paint-spattered flats of Jon Wai-keung Lowe's somewhat too unattractive set. Smith's restrained use of Scott Ludwig's stunning puppets enhances some of the show's most moving passages.

Ben Randle anchors the action well as Tim, growing from nervous teen uncertainty and the wonders of first love through learning the ways of gay life (frank discussions of anal sex included) and selfish but refreshingly honest hedonism to the devotion of caring for his dying lover. Bradly Mena is sweetly and convincingly understated as the almost angelically loyal, uncomplicated John, depicting his long decline with affecting restraint.

Dennis Parks, who capably limns various artsy friends of Tim, ably differentiates between Tim's reluctantly supportive father and John's more rigidly homophobic, Catholic dad, with Danielle Perata as the men's more sympathetic mothers, among other roles. Wesley Cayabyab is a crowd-pleaser as some sharply exaggerated gay characters. Nicole Lungerhausen is particularly pleasing as Tim's lifelong best friend, especially when exchanging titillated teen tips about boyfriends.

There are aspects of the characters that could be more fully explored, and passages when Smith's staging flags a bit - not to mention those infelicitous Australian accents. But for the most part, Murphy's "Man" holds the stage very well.

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