Tunes Become Tonic

When finally he was strong enough to sit without pillows propping him up, Steve Schalchlin settled in front of the piano. He rested his head against the top of the spinet, his cheek against the polished wood, and he played chords. Long, slow, full chords.

“The next morning when I got up, I felt normal for the first time in three years,” Schalchlin said. “The music or the vibrations or whatever--it brought me around.”

Still, he was not well. Music can calm the savage breast; it has not yet cured AIDS.

But over the weeks, those chords became a song. One song turned into 10. Ten songs turned into a musical. And that musical--”The Last Session,” which opens Thursday night at the Laguna Playhouse--turned into a bona fide phenomenon.

Written by Schalchlin’s partner of 14 years, playwright and director Jim Brochu, the play book for “The Last Session” bears an undeniable resemblance to Schalchlin’s life. Gideon, a pop singer whose life has been dismantled by AIDS, goes into the studio to record one final set of songs, having already decided that the next day he will commit suicide. The conflict arrives in the form of three backup singers: Gideon’s former wife, a friend who has a gay son, and Buddy, a newcomer who is a conservative Christian.

For all that, “The Last Session” is not a play about AIDS. The conflict between Buddy and Gideon centers on whether a man can be both gay and Christian, but the deeper issues it touches have to do with the despair brought on by any chronic disease. And, by the way, notes director Brochu, it’s a comedy.

It already has touched audiences. A workshop production at the Zephyr Theatre in Los Angeles sold out in July 1996. Off-off-Broadway, at the 100-seat Currican Theater, the play ran four months beginning in May 1997 and found backers to take it to the larger 47th Street Theater in October, where it ran for another five months.

From each production emerge stories of people whose outlook, if not lives, were transformed by “The Last Session.” People living with disease express relief at seeing their emotions onstage. Caregivers thank Schalchlin for the insight into the psyche of their own sick loved ones. And in once case, an AIDS-affected woman who, like Gideon, had decided to kill herself told the cast afterward that she changed her mind.

Sitting in the audience at the Currican, Michael Alden knew by the third song that he wanted to be a part of this show. A film producer, Alden had lost his own lover to AIDS 10 years earlier. Though he’d never worked on a theatrical show, he signed on as co-producer of the off-Broadway production. He even handed out fliers in Times Square, told people about the play, offered them money-back guarantees if they’d come see it.

“I’ve lost a lot of people [to AIDS], some of whom just gave up,” Alden said. “This play provides some reason as to why hope is important.”

New York critics praised the cast’s singing, particularly that of Bob Stillman, who revisits the role of Gideon in the Laguna Beach production. And while critics also pointed out that the book is a somewhat formulaic vehicle for the songs, few remained unmoved. A reviewer for Back Stage wrote: “I defy anyone to get through it entirely dry-eyed.”

In the small North Hollywood apartment where he and Brochu live, Schalchlin could hardly get through the telling of his own story dry-eyed.

Raised by a Baptist preacher and a nurse in eastern Texas, Schalchlin joined a Christian pop group. They had some regional success, but it didn’t last. He started playing piano and singing in lounges on cruise ships, where he met Brochu. After moving to Los Angeles in the late 1980s, Schalchlin hoped to break into songwriting but instead wound up as the director of the National Academy of Songwriters championing Los Angeles’ burgeoning acoustic music scene in the early 1990s.

Then, on Mother’s Day 1994--about one year after Schalchlin tested positive for HIV--he developed pneumocystis pneumonia. His breathing was so shallow that he could speak only one word at a time. Brochu took him to the emergency room in Santa Monica, where he collapsed.

He regained consciousness in an emergency room bed some time later. A man who was at the hospital with his wife asked what had happened. Schalchlin, who previously had refused to acknowledge the disease that was killing him and who could barely inhale, screamed: “I have AIDS!”

“Bedpans dropped. Doctors turned,” Brochu recalled. “It was one of those moments that you really didn’t want to be there for.” The man who prompted the response--Anson Williams, the actor best known for his role as Potsie on “Happy Days”--was unfazed. “You’re not ready to die,” he told Schalchlin.

Schalchlin’s voice caught a little as he remembered how one friend told him in the hospital, “If you die, a piece of me is going to die too.”

“It touched me so deeply at that moment when I was looking for anything to hang on to,” he said. “I was, honestly, inches from death. . . . Those words were very powerful.”

Nearly a year later, Schalchlin drew on those sentiments in writing his first song, “Connected.” It draws parallels between the hookups to life-sustaining machines and intravenous fluids to the connection between friends. (Williams’ role is immortalized in the lines: “I dreamed I was on ‘Happy Days’ and I was playing Richie / with Potsie begging Richie not to die.”)

He played “Connected” for Brochu but didn’t get through the second verse before they were both weeping. But the music’s potency wasn’t simply emotional. “I saw the effect it had on him to play it,” Brochu said. “I started giving him homework assignments because the music was just as effective as the medicine.”

Then he wrote about support groups (“The Group”), the love of his parents (“The Preacher and the Nurse”), and medicines that seemed to do more harm than good (“Friendly Fire”). By November 1995, he had 10 songs and was thinking of playing in local clubs. But at Thanksgiving, they visited a friend who had a home recording studio. Brochu tapped his life partner on the shoulder and said, “I just saw the whole play.”

*

Yet as the play progressed, Schalchlin’s health declined. By spring 1996, he and Brochu had reached the unspoken conclusion that Schalchlin didn’t have long to live. He was wasting away, and nutrition was being dripped into him through an IV line. “And then,” as Schalchlin tells it, “I fooled everybody.”

His doctor put him on a new protease inhibitor called Crixivan. Two weeks later, his health took a turn for the better. By summer, he had his IV catheter removed and he was playing Gideon in the workshop version of “The Last Session,” the only time he has played the role.

Today, his count of disease-fighting T-cells is at 400--up from a low of 40. His weight, which dropped to 130 pounds, has rebounded to 180. The new drug has side effects, including diabetes. “To me those are minor things compared to being dead.”

Meanwhile, “The Last Session” has taken on a life of its own. At the same time as the Laguna Beach opening, another company is staging “The Last Session” in Australia. A group in Rochester, N.Y., wants to do the play and have Schalchlin play Gideon. After that, the men say, who knows?

“We have never decided where this show is going,” Brochu said. “It has taken us--and we’re just holding on.”

* “The Last Session” opens Thursday night at the Moulton Theater of the Laguna Playhouse, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays at 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays at 2 and 7 p.m. $31-$38. Closes Oct. 11. (949) 497-2787.