‘AIDS! The Musical!’: Reflection of Anger : * Stage: The show’s creators hope its outrageous title will attract--and engage--a large audience and move them to action.

“You’ve had the disease, you’ve attended the demonstration. Now see the musical!”

That unusual rallying cry is for “AIDS! The Musical!,” premiering Friday at Highways in Santa Monica, the final entry in the theater’s third annual Ecce Lesbo/Ecce Homo gay and lesbian performance festival. Billed as an “all-singing, all-dancing, all-queer” adventure, the show (with book and lyrics by Wendell Jones and David Stanley, music by Robert Berg) traces the political and spiritual awakening of a gay man after he’s diagnosed as having AIDS.

“We take an apolitical person--a good, decent person who’s led an uneventful life--and put him in an extraordinary situation,” said Jones, 38. “During the next six months, we take Ted through spirituality groups, to sex clubs, to a Radical Faerie gathering, have him get involved with AIDS buddies, take him to an ACT UP meeting. He becomes dogmatically political, obsessed with political activism to the point where it’s not always healthy for him--although it is the one thing keeping him alive.”

Although neither of the authors has AIDS, each has been hit hard by the mounting number of deaths around him; Jones (who has struggled with cancer) rattles off a litany that includes “my best friend from high school, my best friend from college, my cousin.” The show is stitched together from many stories, the collective experiences of the authors, their friends and collaborators. Practically the only people not represented are heterosexuals.

“We have a transsexual character,” Jones said. “She comes out at the beginning of the second act and says, ‘A number of you have asked why we don’t have any heterosexual people in the show. The answer is very simple: We don’t have to. People also say, ‘Why don’t you have some pretty little children with AIDS, someone you can really feel sorry for?’ At that point, she pulls out a little baby doll and says, ‘This is Rebecca. She’s an innocent victim. She hasn’t asked for the disease nor does she want it.’ ”

The point, Jones says, is that this is not the “blameless” heterosexual AIDS tragedy often played out in the media. “This is the story of a particular community--the gay community of West Hollywood and Silver Lake. It’s a limited part of the story; there are many more stories to come. The fact that we didn’t try to balance it out with heterosexual characters to make people comfortable doesn’t mean their stories aren’t important. And I do hope that it crosses over. I think it’s a compelling story.”

So why risk putting off potential audiences with such a flip title?

“We wanted to grab ahold of people and shake them,” Jones acknowledges. “We used the title ‘AIDS! The Musical!’ partly to get people angry, partly to get their attention--and partly because we’re angry. A lot of that anger is at the government, a lot of it is at (President) George Bush, because he’s the top symbol. Reagan refused to even say the word AIDS . Bush is willing to say it, but won’t give any money to deal with it. In the meantime, thousands of people have died.”

The show attempts to balance that anger with defiance, hope--and even humor. Director Alan Pulner (whose “Dream a Little Dream of Me: The Gay and Lesbian History Performance Project” played at Highways last April) stresses that the show’s most comedic moments are rooted in real emotion: “There’s a juxtaposition between the wild, cartoonish behavior and what’s feeding it--our own anger, pain and grief. So the outrageousness always has a human side.”

And a committed political sensibility. “We share a lot of concerns,” Pulner said of the ensemble. “We create performance art pieces, but last year we also demonstrated against the NEA, and protested at the Getty. So our lives, politics and art interweave and intermingle.”

Within the gay activist community, the play’s subject matter has not appeared to cause any ill will. In fact, it’s much the opposite. “There are so many AIDS stories,” said Nicole Russo, media coordinator at AIDS Project Los Angeles, who lost her brother to the disease. “This is just another way to deal with it--and just as valid as other people’s expressions.”

W. Wayne Karr, a member of the radical group Queer Nation, thinks the show is “a fabulous idea. Being a person with AIDS and an AIDS activist, and being so submerged in death the last few years, we forget there’s life. This is a chance to celebrate life. And laughter is a very healing thing.”

Split among a cast of 10, the show’s musical score offers a dozen original songs; the styles span country, rock, Broadway-type tunes and rap. “The first song, ‘Everything’s Gonna Be Fine’ is sung to the first person in the show who dies,” Jones says with a chuckle. “Another song is about coming out to your family--and this person from a dysfunctional family had to come out three times, because every time he told them they’d get so drunk they forgot.”

Highways’ co-artistic director Tim Miller welcomes the work as a larger-scale entry to what is often a solo arena: “It’s a project that parallels (the artists’) grass-roots political values.”

Co-author Stanley, 26, originally hooked up with Jones in “a kind of artist-guerrilla collective” from ACT UP, and hopes the production serves not only to bring together two often divergent factions in the gay community--political activists and spiritual healers--”but also shows what an amazing, vital community it is.”

Adds Jones: “In almost all the people I know, when they’ve gotten involved as a AIDS buddy or a political activist or a legislative aide, it’s been a completely life-changing experience. It’s opened up their sexuality, it’s opened up their friendships, it’s opened up their relationship to the planet. We live in a society that’s incredibly asleep, that’s forgotten how to value love, how to value physical contact, trees and animals. When you face death like this, you wake up. And then you turn on.”