From left: Thursday Farrar is Professor Diane Gold, Matt Walker is Matt, Adrian David Greensmith is Gary, and Jonathan Burke is Jeff in David J. Glass’s drama Love + Science.
Beginning with a chance meeting, David J. Glass’s new play Love + Science traces the lives of two gay medical students amid the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. After a 1981 welcoming ceremony for medical students at Columbia, Jeff (Jonathan Burke) asks another student, Matt (Matt Walker), to take his picture. Soon they are revealing intimacies that suggest personal minefields: “My mother sent her best wishes,” says Matt, tentative and reserved, while the forthright Jeff announces, “I got, ‘Get out of my house, you faggot,’ when I was 17 … been on my own ever since.” Jeff also registers that Matt is a whiz kid—he’s only 20 (though he’ll be far older by the end).
Matt with Imani Pearl Williams as his lab partner Melissa.
Under the direction of Allen MacLeod, scenes move swiftly on Zoë Hurwitz’s mobile set, speeded by Samuel J. Biondolillo’s projections and Jane Shaw’s voice-overs of 1980s news reports about AIDS.
Initially, Matt expects to fund his studies partly from $3,000 owed him by Steve Rubell, for whom he worked at Studio 54, but Rubell (nimbly played as a jittery cokehead by Tally Sessions) claims the feds have impoverished him. At Studio 54 Matt also runs into Nicky (Ryan Knowles), an ex-lover, but Nicky can’t even scrape up his own rent, and he advises Matt, “Find yourself another guy … someone who won’t hold you back.”
Academically, Matt begins work with Professor Diane Gold (a wryly efficient Thursday Farrar). He discovers that Jeff is already a disciple, although he is going for a medical degree, while Matt is determined to do research on retroviruses. Matt and Jeff inevitably hook up—but only briefly.
Matt buries himself in his work despite Jeff’s hopes for continuing romance.
Although Burke does a fine job of showing Jeff evolving from party animal to ACT-UP activist, the linchpin of the play is Walker’s flawed Matt. Though both he and Jeff are determined to excel, Matt is willing to surrender more of his personal life to pursue his work. Walker (himself a PhD candidate in genetics at Columbia) so vividly embodies Matt, apprehensive and weighing his options at every step, that one can predict he will pull back even after a night of sexual pleasure with Jeff. In an early scene, Matt goes into a gay club and offers himself up for orgiastic sex. The move is at odds with Matt’s personality, yet it fosters longstanding guilt since he can’t know his HIV status—no tests yet exist. In a masterly performance, Walker persuasively shows a man who embraces a celibacy that is both stunting and heroic, given the purported risks of merely kissing or breathing the same air as someone who’s infected.
Love + Science sketches the personal fears deftly, but abstruse exchanges of scientific language that may be meant to enlighten often deaden the drama:
Jeff: That’s the whole problem with retroviruses. You can’t remove that integrated DNA.… It becomes part of the cell’s DNA as long as the cell lives.
Matt: The virus’s genes become ... just part of the host cell? And they can never be erased?
Matt’s impulsive visit to a gay club affects his future romantic life. Photographs by Emilio Madrid.
As Matt and Jeff mature, Glass tries to cover too much territory. Matt’s lab partner, Melissa (Imani Pearl Williams), becomes a friend, and he tries to “go straight” on a blind date with a woman (also Williams) that goes brutally wrong for him. Meanwhile, Matt and Jeff interact with various patients, notably a gay youth named Gary (a bewildered, trembling Adrian David Greensmith, showing frighteningly accurate lesions from Kaposi’s sarcoma). Nicky reenters Matt’s life, too—attached to an IV and accompanied by his boyfriend James (Sessions).
The play leaps forward twice, first to 1987, when Matt and Jeff are doing graduate work, and Jeff gets Matt to attend a demonstration pressing for approval of the drug AZT. Accurate testing has arrived, and Jeff’s romantic devotion finally wins the day after both men test negative.
Yet the last scene, in May 2021, amid COVID, is polemical and problematic. Matt is approached by Joe (McCalley), a student sent by Melissa, now estranged. Joe asks Matt to mentor an LGBTQ+ group. Walker is especially impressive here; he seems to have lapsed back to Matt’s old isolation and profound disillusion. He hectors Joe about the disparity between COVID deaths and those from AIDS:
Thirty-two million people dead. And there are close to forty million other people with HIV globally, today, Joe, forty years after the epidemic started.
However, the weight given to the polemics throws off the effect of the play’s last lines, which carry a delicate hope for the weary Matt. It feels like the play just stops, and rather weakly at that. Still, uneven as it is, there’s much to appreciate in Love + Science.
In Vitro Productions’ Love + Science runs through July 6 at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Stage II 131 W. 55th St.) Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday through Saturday; matinees are at 2:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets call (212) 581-1212 or visit loveandscienceplay.com.
Playwright: David J. Glass
Direction: Allen MacLeod
Scenic Design: Zoë Hurwitz
Costume Design: Camilla Dely
Lighting & Projections Design: Samuel J. Biondolillo
Sound Design: Jane Shaw
