Into Africa Bathsheba Doran’s Gloucester Living Room BY CAROLYN CLAY

The title of Bathsheba Doran’s urgent new play is ironic. The action does unfold in the living room of a house in the bush of Botswana, an hour from "the city" but only a short walk from an impoverished village where AIDS leaves corpses strewing the streets. But Living Room in Africa actually refers to all the "living room" that’s being made available in a scenic Third World spot where the living who used to occupy it are dead or dying. What we can, or should, do about that is a question asked by this compelling if not entirely convincing work by the 30-year-old Oxbridge-educated British dramatist who’s now a playwriting fellow at Juilliard.

Living Room in Africa was developed last summer at the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference and is headed for a New York production. Meanwhile, Daniel Goldstein, who helmed the Huntington Theatre Company’s smart Falsettos as well as the O’Neill workshop of Living Room, is directing a potent production of the play at Gloucester Stage Company (through August 28), whose artistic director, Israel Horovitz, found his socks knocked off by it.

Horovitz’s footwear was not wrong: Doran’s characters are complicated and compromised; their interaction is passionate, their dialogue believable. What’s less credible is the play’s premise. Art dealer Edward and his companion, unstable published Brit poet Marie, have recently arrived in Botswana, and they’re renting a large house outside the town where Edward is building an art gallery financed by Western money. The couple seem taken aback, if not entirely surprised, by the AIDS situation. And would "investors" really throw money at an African art gallery whose point seems to be that an impoverished people in the midst of a horrifying health crisis will be able to wander in free of charge "and look at a Rothko"?

Doran uses reaction to the AIDS devastation to drive a wedge between Edward, who when he fully understands the situation wants to flee dropping cash in his wake, and Marie, who feels compelled to stay and "bear witness." But there are no clear-cut good and bad guys here. There is Marie’s visiting brother, Mark, who’s so offended by African contractor Anthony’s attitude toward women and his belief in AIDS as God’s scourge that he flounces off into the African night, where he may be eaten by something more formidable than Western guilt. There’s Anthony himself, an energetic African man who wants to ditch his "sick" wife and baby for an opportunity in America and has Edward pressed up against the wall to facilitate it. And there’s Nsugo, the African domestic whose carriage is elegant but whose kids are dropping dead. Marie, unable to shoulder the entire pandemic, befriends Nsugo and takes the family in. Most insensitive, yet not a villain, is amiable Michael Lee, the American banker whose house Edward and Marie are renting; he shows up to inform the exiting Edward, "You’re not the bank, you don’t owe the world."

At GSC, the play unfolds in a beam-and-stucco living room, one decorated with and then defoliated of modern art, by ace set designer Jenna McFarland. The scene changes are moodily papered by sound designer Matt Griffin with classical music, mostly strings.

The performances, though sporadically accent-challenged, crackle. Particularly fine is Polly Lee as Marie, convincingly British and moving from pert mania to a sadness that borders on catatonia. Nathaniel McIntyre battles some holes in the character of the naive art dealer who builds a swimming pool to provide the villagers "hope" and then decides he should take his efforts elsewhere, but he does home in on Edward’s solicitous care of Marie. He even manages his Judge Brack moment at the end.

The excellent Billy Eugene Jones bristles with on-the-make energy as Anthony, who in the face of such despair makes ignorance and opportunism feel forgivable. Jackie Davis brings a dancer’s hauteur to the reserved Nsugo. And Sean McGuirk supplies Michael Lee with sufficient bonhomie to perform minor plastic surgery on the Ugly American.