The Whispers of Angels.

DAVID ROUSSEVE/REALITY BAM MAJESTIC THEATER NOVEMBER 28-DECEMBER 3, 1995 REVIEWED BY GUS SOLOMONS JR

David Rousseve is a special kind of triple threat: writer, actor, dancer. Though his skill at each is less than spectacular, his knock for staging and shrewd musical choices has landed his theater piece, The Whispers of Angels, impressively in the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival.

Rousseve combines text, music, and dance effectively. Furthermore, he markets his movement-theater to a dance audience, thus avoiding too-close scrutiny of the writing, which (funny opening monologue aside) is not deep. The narrative--a gay man dying alone of AIDS seeks the love of his abusive father--is calculated to push all our emotional buttons. Fortunately, the story does not reflect Rousseve's own situation. Ironically, that may partly explain why its appeal to our emotions is not altogether convincing. Because Rousseve is so robust, his plaintive gasp, "I'm dying; please hold my hand," as he stands vulnerably nude, draws attention to his acting technique and physical beauty rather than arousing our sympathy.

Yvette Glover, who narrates the tale of Rousseve's dream of father-love, is earth-motherly enough to rock the whole audience at once in her warm embrace. Lavelle Zeigler, the mean father, emerges from the audience dressed as a department-store Santa while Rousseve recounts climbing onto his lap at his part-time job to get the only tenderness he could from his dad, who'd later beat him at home. As Nina Simone, the father's favorite singer, croons (on tape), the dancers of Rousseve's company Reality, dressed in white pajamas by Carol Ann Pelletier, swing their partners into the air or press them overhead like rag dolls and clasp themselves in symbolic hugs. A chorus of seventeen extras sits on folding chairs or lies quietly on the ground side by side, bearing silent witness. Once, they clasp hands to form an elevated pathway for dancer Charmaine Warren to traverse.

Set designer Debby Lee Coben dresses the stage first with fragments of Greek columns, then renders a heaven out of cheap disposables: pop bottle leaves on spindly trees, plastic vines and pinwheel flowers adorning a chain-link fence footlighted by gallon-jug lamps. Beverly Emmons lights the dance scenes in intimate pools and floods paradise with garish light that spills onto the audience's rapt faces, as they join in the finale, When the Saints Go Marchin' In sung by pop-gospel diva B.J. Crosby (as a guardian angel) with a voice that pierces your soul like a laser through steel.

Without doubt, Whispers represents a major step for this young artist. Rousseve manipulates us masterfully with a fool-resistant formula: Whites in the audience can assuage their racial guilt by adulating African American culture at a safe distance, while blacks can revel in Rousseve's sassy black attitude and Glover and Crosby's soul-stirring music. It's two Hours of good entertainment, legitimized with token concern for the plight of a gay black man in a racist society. Then, conscience absolved, the audience can leave the theater to continue business as usual.