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Lonely Planet

 ((The Fountain Theatre at the Matrix; 99 seats; $ 25 top))

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

The Fountain Theatre presents a play in one act by Steven Dietz. Directed by Stephen Sachs. Set, Sets to Go; costumes, Shon Le Blanc; lighting, J. Kent Inasy; sound, Charles Dayton; artistic associate, Jack Newalu; fight director, Marty Pistone; technical director, Scott Tuomey; production stage manager, Jesica Korbman. Opened Nov. 15, 1996; reviewed Nov. 16; runs through Dec. 22. Running time: 1 hour, 30 min. Cast: Philip Anglim (Cal), Taylor Nichols (Jody). Amite too precious for its own good, Steven Dietz's "Lonely Planet," an elliptical play about the effects of AIDS on the friendship between two rather ethereal young men, prides itself on the obliqueness that dampens its emotional power. The play's two performers, however, are so in tune to its gentle archness that they almost make a virtue of its oddnesses; they give it a lovely shine. Taylor Nichols plays Jody, the proprietor of a map store, which offers the first clue to the play's allegorical otherworldliness. Such establishments do not exactly litter the modern urban landscape. Jody has decided to shut himself off from the real world's chaos by remaining inside his store, an alternative universe where the world has been carefully ordered and contained. Surrounded thus by "pictures of what is known," Jody thinks he can fend off the unknown terrors outside. Nichols, using his boyish demeanor and still more boyish voice (familiar from Whit Stillman's movies) to nice effect, explains that outside the map store's comforting universe, his friends are dying. Proof comes soon enough with the arrival of Jody's oddball pal Cal (Anglim), who darts in and out, carting an assortment of chairs into the store, and trailing behind him clouds of whimsy and portent. The phone rings; another friend is dead; another chair arrives. His eyes gleaming with the burnished glow of grief, his rich voice veering between the befuddled distraction of the permanently shell-shocked and the seething rage that comes from bearing witness to a plague, Anglim makes Cal a memorable figure , noble and madcap, an unlikely combination only an actor of uncommon grace could pull off. He's well-matched with Nichols' Jody, matter-of-fact in his own loopiness, as these two friends spar over Jody's decision to shut himself away. Dietz's writing has some charms here the speech that gives the play its title is simple and affecting, as is an exchange about the importance of friendship but the play sometimes seems like a symbol-laden catch-all container for his musings about AIDS and the world's reaction to it. Cal has a moralistic diatribe about society's "Neanderthal puritanism"; there is some moving talk about the terrors of "being tested." And yet, in keeping with the play's studied obliqueness, the disease is never mentioned by name. Maybe Dietz believes that moving AIDS to the plane of abstraction and allegory will imbue it with a universally symbolic resonance. But as other playwrights have indelibly proved over the last decade and more, tragedy on the scale of AIDS hardly needs any coy embellishment. (Proceeds from the run of the play will go to Equity Fight AIDS and an HIV/AIDS acting workshop.) Charles Isherwood