An Underground Hideaway

Now that the AIDS epidemic has entered its second decade, more and more plays like Michael Fife's The Hideaway Hilton, will appear on Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway stages to explore the worrisome issues of internment and quarantine.

In The Hideaway Hilton, which ran for three weeks at the Theatre of 224 Waverly Place (Greenwich Village), six characters have hidden in an underground bomb shelter to escape the intensive roundup by the authorities of all those infected with an unnamed disease (probably AIDS, to judge by the symptoms alluded to).

With an ear always to the door for the dreaded knock that never comes, the characters--a male escort of rich old ladies, a yuppie couple, a gay man from the Deep South, a lesbian hack writer, and a young woman (under whose house the bomb shelter is located)--while away the monotonous, fearful days underground playing board games and movie trivia, revealing their most intimate secrets, and fighting (verbally and physically) with each other.

The play would have been more poignant had there been more of a gloom-and-doom ambiance and less campiness, particularly from Fife, whose voice and mannerisms bespoke a gay man rather than a fabulously gorgeous hunk who swept women off their feet.

This article was originally published in the New York Amsterdam News (November 21, 1991).