JUST SAY NO LIVES!

LARRY KRAMER'S ANGRY FARCE ON AIDS AND THE REAGANS GETS A NEW PRODUCTION IN CHICAGO

Greg Louganis and Alexandra Billings are all over each other. And they've just met. Emanating the star wattage of Tom and Nicole, the acting duo are jesting their way through a Los Angeles photo shoot to promote their starring roles in the Bailiwick Theatre staging of Larry Kramer's Just Say No, a play that takes on the AIDS-blindness of President Reagan's America. It's also a full-on bedroom farce, complete with slamming doors, musical beds, and a cast of oddly familiar characters. As Junior and Mrs. Potentate, ruling family of a country called New Columbia, Louganis jetes across the stage in nothing but a towel in search of gay sex and a ballet career while Billings plays a Lady Macbeth in heat, hell-bent on destroying a sex-orgy video threatening Mr. Potentate's hope or reelection.

"And everything in the play is tru!" exclaims Kramer, on the telephone from his East Coast home. "I'm printing a list of all my sources in the program. People can verify the researchers."

Billings, a glamorous and bawdy brunet throwback to an earlier era of theatricial divas, elaborates. "Unlike other farces where you just enjoy the high jinks and near misses, you can't turn your brain off. As you're laughing you can't help seeing AIDS in a different light. At the reading last year, I never heard an audience laugh like that before, but during the last monologue there was dead silence. People got much more than they bargained for."

That may hold true especially for the play's stars. While both have met success onstage--Louganis in New York City productions of Jeffrey and the Only Thing Worse You Could Have Told Me ... and Billings in critically acclaimed Chicago productions, tackling everything from Brecht to roles such as Gertrude Stein and Cruella De Vil--the actors are making their debuts in a political hot potato(e). Washington wags certainly remember the Reagan crowd's ruthless damage control after the 1986 publication of Vicki: The True Story of Vicki Morgan and Alfred Bloomingdale and the Affair That Shook the Highest Levels of Government and Society (St. Martin's Press), which alleged the existence of a videotaped orgy involving Reagan administration officials--much like the video over which Kramer's crowd of nymphos, leather fetishists, and closet cases bed and betray one another.

Just Say No was slammed by critics after a 1988 New York production, and Kramer had no intention of revisiting the play until he went to Chicago last July to attend the Bailiwick's one-night-only benefit reading, starring Billings. "She was an apparition, a force of nature," he enthuses. "When you see a great talent like that performing your work, you think, Hey, I want mope. At the time I didn't know she was transsexual."

The star resists being seen as a "transsexual actress," but she needn't worry, having earned both awards and respect since her professional debut 11 years ago. "Alexandra is one of the most extraordinary talents I have ever come across," says Kramer, author of The Normal Heart and screenwriter of Women in Love. "And you're talking to the man who helped make Glenda Jackson a star." Laughing at the compliment, Billings says only, "This kind of thing comes along rarely in a career."

For his part, Louganis is easygoing. "The reason I wanted to do Just Say No was one part Larry, one part timing," he observes casually while his Jack Russell and Border terriers wander across the table during lunch at the shoot.

In front of the camera and face-to-face, the stars couldn't be more different. While Billings is gregarious and engages with everyone from the makeup guy to the cook, Louganis is initially reserved, offering a shy smile and one-word answers. Their approaches to stage work are also worlds apart. Louganis admits he doesn't do "a whole lot of research" on his roles, while Billings frets over her tendency to "overresearch and really go way too far in my head."

But both say they immediately fell in love with the play that all now agree was a little ahead of its time. Eleven years after the play's debut, the nation no longer blushes over White House sex or blusters about gay public figures. The current production remains essentially unchanged, with all the sexual kinks, orgies, and hypocrisy of power players who resemble Ed Koch, Alfred Bloomingdale, and Nancy Reagan herself laid out in explicit, exquisite detail.

"I have no doubt whatsoever that AIDS was allowed to happen because of sexual secrets," Kramer says. "More historic decisions have been made because of what's going on in the bedroom than what's happening in the Oval Office."

Political gossip, AIDS activism, and bedroom farce have a lot in common, in all three, no scandal is allowed to die, no secret remains unspoken, and the transsexuals get all the best lines.

Gutierrez is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times and Latina magazine.