Interview by Matteo PiniPortrait by Tadhg Joseph

MP How does The AIDS Plays Project select a play?

AC All the plays we stage are by queer writers whose lives were cut short by HIV or AIDS-related illnesses. Some of the plays we’ve done were successful and published when their writers were still alive, so even if they’ve fallen out of print, there’s usually a manuscript that can  be accessed, rehearsed and performed. But as the project has continued to grow, and as we’ve got to know our audience better, I’ve become interested in finding plays that were never performed or published, as well as works that can be softly subverted through casting. Often, we pair reasonably established actors with up-and-coming queer and trans+ actors in roles that weren’t originally written for them. I also look for works with a festive quality, that are funny, lively, anarchic, quick or prescient.

MP You’ve previously identified two influences for The AIDS Plays Project: Robert Giard’s 1985 book Particular Voices and the work of Peter Hujar. What was consequential about these particular artists?

AC It’s because they document a generation that has largely passed under the radar due to premature death. Robert Giard’s series was procedural in the way he set out to document a generation of queer artists, whereas Hujar’s work was more about documenting friends. Their portraits led me to a handful of playwrights: Harry Kondoleon, Robert Chesley, Charles Ludlam. I was also inspired by conversations with queer elders – there are several people I turned to while setting up the project who said, “Consider this writer”. Two of those people are Victor Bumbalo, an American playwright, and Don Shewey, a theatre critic. Both have since become good friends and mentors to me.

MP Queer theatre often hinges on moments of traumatic transformation. You have works about coming out or being outed, and many of the canonical works about AIDS, like Angels in America (1991) or even Rent (1996), are about death and suffering. What I find refreshing about the work you stage is its focus on pleasure.

AC There’s an interesting question as to why the canonical works of queer drama so often revered by mainstream theatres tend to centre on loss and death, rather than sensuality or celebration, messiness, or subversion. As a younger generation of queer people, we’ve grown up after the AIDS crisis and are lucky not to have been directly affected by it – but its shadow still looms large. Several plays we’ve staged have explored this tension, including Jerker, or The Helping Hand, a 1986 play by Chesley in which two men have phone sex. They’re too afraid to meet in person, but that doesn’t stop them from conjuring wild, orgiastic fantasies night after night. For them – and for Chesley as a writer – the crisis doesn’t eclipse the everyday urgencies of pleasure, intimacy, resistance, culture, joy and art.

MP Tell me about the playwrights featured in the upcoming season.

AC We begin with Alan Bowne, a Californian playwright who arrived in New York in the 1970s and wrote about the gritty underbelly of the Lower East Side. His plays are about teenage hustlers, sex workers, pimps and drug dealers. Titles like Cocaine & Underpants, The Little Monsters or The Able-Bodied Seaman speak for themselves! We’ve chosen a work by him that is a slight departure from his typical style: a brilliant but unperformed play from 1985 called Spook. It’s about two cousins in their forties who inherit a house on the Massachusetts coast after the death of their aunt. They are haunted by a twinky bisexual ghost called Smithers, who is dressed in 18th century smuggler attire but undresses over the course of the show. The play is an erotic, pulpy farce, riffing on Restoration comedy and Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964). This will also be its world premiere, so we’re curious to see how it lands. I’m also really excited about staging Milo Lookingale, a semi-autobiographical one-man show written and performed in 1992 by Jim Jewell, a community theatre organiser in Illinois Valley. The script was recently rediscovered and sent to us by a group of performers in Oregon. It’s a frank and furious dispatch from the heart of the AIDS crisis, exploring the survivor’s guilt of Milo, a middle-aged man who has lost all his friends to the epidemic. We close the season with The Rights, a sharp and moving play by George Whitmore from 1980 about ageing, betrayal and the commodification of queer culture, set on Fire Island at the height of summer. Whitmore was an American AIDS activist, journalist and novelist who died in 1989. The play has never been published or staged in the UK until now. 

MP Many of the plays you stage don’t exist in any one singular manuscript.

AC When we staged Reasons for Staying by the Irish playwright Colm Ó Clúbhán earlier this year, it hadn’t been performed since 1986, and no definitive version of the script existed in the archives. We had to piece together a text that felt as close as possible to Colm’s intentions. All the plays we’ve performed have, in some way, required an intervention. With Jerker, for instance, we cast East London legend Ms Sharon Le Grand as a narrator, delivering Chesley’s gloriously filthy stage directions detailing exactly how the men were masturbating. It was the highlight of the evening!

MP But you impose strict formal limitations on the performances.

AC We rehearse for only three days and present the show with full costumes, sound, and lighting. The actors perform with scripts in hand. By removing fixed blocking or staging, the performances feel immediate in a way I’ve come to really enjoy. It allows us to work with brilliant actors who generously give up their time, and creates an atmosphere that’s playful and improvisational.

MP That emphasis on text is also felt in the show programmes.

AC With each show, we want audiences to encounter the play through the life of its writer. In our programmes, we piece together their biography, photographs, and conversations we’ve had with surviving friends, family, and collaborators. For queer people our age, it can be easy to feel marooned in the present, with so few elders to look to. We are staging these plays to say: queer history is yours for the taking. I’m always bemoaning the lack of queer work on stage today, and that’s how The AIDS Plays Project began. I wanted to do something about it. .