“It’s Only the End of the World”
Written by Jean-Luc Lagarce
Showing: Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division Ave., through Dec. 22.
Tickets: $15-$22
Contact: (847) 217-0691; www.tutato.com

By Web Behrens

Contributing writer

The AIDS pandemic has obviously taken its toll on the ranks of artists everywhere—but not that you could tell from “It’s Only the End of the World,” the brainchild of HIV-positive playwright Jean-Luc Lagarce, who died in 1995, just as the life-saving new drug “cocktails” were emerging. Despite the play’s endless chatter—which includes an early admission directly to the audience from Louis, its seemingly healthy protagonist, that he’s dying—this talky drama never once mentions the virus that claimed its author. As another World AIDS Day approaches (Dec. 1), that’s an ironic omission. For all we know, Louis could be afflicted with cancer or kidney failure.

Of course, no one’s saying the show must specifically address AIDS. The marvelous “Marvin’s Room” (by the late Chicagoan Scott McPherson, who died 15 years ago this November) dealt with terminal illness, death and grieving amidst an emotionally messed-up family; though the play (and later, the film) dealt specifically with the afflictions of stroke and leukemia, HIV was clearly pulsing in its subtext. But “It’s Only the End of the World” doesn’t even really have a subtext about death, and Louis never fulfills the goal that drives him to reunite with his estranged family. In other words, he never tells anyone that he’s about to die. Instead, everyone just argues generically about the past.

Lagarce is virtually unknown in the United States, although his works are still widely produced in France. (Tellingly, there’s no English-language Wikipedia entry about him.) That prominence in his home country, a decade after his death, indicates that there’s something to his work, though it’s difficult to find it in this production. Much of the fault seems to belong to the script, though there are some poetic passages. Still, the dialogue is loaded with clumsy exposition and the characters all have a tendency to simply tell us what they think and feel, rather than to demonstrate it. For people who are so emotionally stuck, they sure have a lot to say about old wounds. For two acts, every one of the five characters speaks in complicated elliptical monologues that merely pose as conversation, a technique that soon becomes numbingly tedious.

As Louis, Chris Cantelmi brings a groundedness and some believability to a character who admits, early on, that he’s “avoiding the issue” of his impending death. The other characters display fewer shadings, and actors Andy Hager and Alice Wedoff (as Louis’s brother and sister) don’t get much past anger and whining, little of which is believable. Director Zeljko Djukich’s production runs out of steam—and the audience’s good will—long before its two hours are up.