----------------------------------------------------------- .— ----------------------------------------------- ---- —juna H 1998 » J iu t out
INTERVIEW
C
onsider the images that hover over these
last 15 years as our society has tried to
deal with the enormity of the A ID S crisis:
a darkened theater with an angel hanging
over a PWA’s bed, the public spectacles of
mourning our losses and expressing our rage
through the new rituals of memorials and A C T
UP street theater, the memories of the many
performances where artists helped people find a
way through a very difficult time.
David Román has spent almost a decade
researching and writing his book Acts of
Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture and
AIDS, a riveting examination of how theater
and performance responded to AIDS. From
cabarets and candlelight vigils to edgy perfor­
mance art and full-scale Broadway productions
such as Angels in America and Rent, public per­
formances and theatrical texts have shaped,
and been shaped by, the unprecedented chal­
lenge of the A ID S crisis. A n associate professor
of English at the University of Southern
California and co-editor with Holly Hughes of
the forthcoming anthology of plays O Solo
Homo: The New Queer Performance, Román
has committed himself to making sure this
inspiring story of how a gay culture created
itself one day at a time is remembered and
honored.
In Acts of Intervention, we see again and
again the potential for theater to change, chal­
lenge and heal our lives. With an abiding
respect and love for the creative acts made dur­
ing a very difficult time in our history, David
Román says, “I believe that performance really
matters and makes a difference in our lives.”
I first met Román in 1990 after a perfor­
mance of mine at the Walker Art Center in
Minneapolis. I was immediately impressed by
his commitment and enthusiasm for the whole
variety of queer theatrical and performance
activity that was exploding as we entered the
’90s. We have gone to the theater, to demon­
strations and to memorials together in the
years since— all clearly “acts of intervention”
in these challenging times. We recently sat
down at The Abbey, a cafe in West
Hollywood, to talk about his remarkable book.
A cts of Intervention is the very first book
to examine gay theater and A ID S . Tell me
why you wrote this book and how it came
about.
I wrote Acts of Intervention between 1990
and 1996; it came out of my involvement with
A C T UP and other forms of A ID S activism.
I got my Ph.D. in comparative literature in
1990, shortly after your N EA [National
Endowment for the Arts] funding crisis. Given
that queer theater was under attack and that
A ID S was decimating our communities, I felt
compelled to focus my research on the impor­
tant work that was happening in theaters and
performance spaces across the country. I wanted
to document and engage the ways that gay peo­
ple were responding to the epidemic. I especial­
ly wanted to focus on the performing arts.
The book begins with the public perfor­
mances of the early 1980s and proceeds histori­
cally. I end the book with a discussion of Rent,
the celebrated musical, and the larger cultural
climate surrounding A ID S in the summer of
1996.
I have my own memories as a young gay
man in the early ’ 80 s devouring the theater
and performance that was addressing A ID S .
What was your personal investment in these
theater pieces and community events that
gathered people together? Did you look to
theater’s response to the crisis as a way of
understanding your own confusions and fears
around A ID S?
Communal gatherings were— and still are—
Reaction readings
Theater artist Urn Miller questions author David Román
about his history of the theatrical response to AIDS
by
T im M iller
crucial events in helping us make sense of
A ID S, whether it’s seeing a play, participating
in a candlelight vigil, or attending a fund­
raiser.
I was living in Madison, Wisconsin, up
until 1987. I didn’t get to see some of the earli­
est work happening on the coasts. What this
meant for many of us in these other cities out­
side the major queer urban centers, was that we
had to create our own representations, we had
set out to be great works of art. The goals of
A ID S activist art are all about helping us come
up with ways to best confront AIDS.
A s I read Acts of Intervention, I was
struck by what a huge and compelling story
this is, the response of performing artists to
this new crisis in our midst.
The book casts a wide net— I look at main­
stream, alternative and community-based per­
David Román
to work within the local politics, resources, and
needs of our communities.
I was active in Madison A ID S Support
Network, organizing many of their earliest
fund-raisers. I put together an evening of per­
formance at a bar where I was working at the
time, the Cardinal Bar, where local dancers,
singers and drag performers from the communi­
ty entertained the audience. We raised about
$500, more than any other benefit at the time.
While we didn’t make much money, the event
provided many of us in the community an
opportunity to come together and support one
another.
The University [of Wisconsin-Madison]
production of The Normal Heart a few years
later was another galvanizing event for us. We
used this opportunity to use the university’s
resources to help us get the word out. Our
efforts in Madison were not unique or excep­
tional; queer people across the country were
organizing these kinds of events throughout the
1980s.
1 actually got involved in AIDS work
through the movie Buddies, which I saw in
1985. While I didn’t think the movie was such
a great film, it had a profound impact on me
and got me to volunteer for the local grass­
roots A ID S group. Buddies taught me two
things: first, on a more personal level, that I
could do something to help people with
A ID S— I didn’t need to be a doctor or a social
worker; second, that community-based art pro­
vides a unique service to queer people. AIDS
films, performances and plays don’t necessarily
formances in cities from San Francisco to New
York— but it is by no means an encyclopedia of
AIDS theater. I discuss major plays such as The
Normal Heart, Angels in America and Jeffrey, but
I also consider lots of forgotten performances
that I’ve uncovered through my research.
What were some of the surprises you
found in writing this book?
Perhaps the most significant historical con­
tributions my book offers is that it challenges
two pretty solid myths about A ID S theater and
activism. The first is the idea that there was no
direct A ID S activism before the arrival of
A C T UP in 1987, and the second myth is that
The Normal Heart and As Is were the first
A ID S plays.
My book uncovers and records various pub­
lic A ID S demonstrations and protests through­
out the country. In cities ranging from
Houston, Chicago, Atlanta and Seattle— cities
that weren’t epicenters of A ID S such as New
York, San Francisco and Los Angeles— a viable
AIDS activism was part of the immediate
response to AIDS. This was also true for the
cities hit the hardest by AIDS.
Acts of Intervention is unusual in that it
focuses on works produced throughout the
country and not just the New York theater
scene.
I’ve lived in a number of different cities
since the 1980s: Madison, Chicago, the Twin
Cities, Los Angeles, Seattle, Philadelphia and
New York City. In each of these cities I wit­
nessed an enormous output of support from the
gay community in response to AIDS. I was also
directly involved in various A ID S service orga­
nizations or activist groups in these cities.
Performance was a critical component in
these efforts to intervene in the A ID S crisis.
A ID S performance happens everywhere, not
just in New York City. I know this because
often I was there to see it.
How were you able to research some of
these performances around the country?
Thanks to the gay and lesbian press, I was
able to read about many of the performances 1
didn’t see or wasn’t even aware of, in reviews or
profiles in community newspapers. Various
artists opened up their personal archives to me,
sometimes leaving me the only copies of their
work. Gay and lesbian community archives,
such as Philadelphia’s Penguin Place and AIDS
Information Library, were extremely helpful.
I was also interested from the start in plac­
ing A ID S performance in a national context,
looking at the various types of theater and per­
formance pieces diverse communities organized
in response to AIDS.
Acts of Intervention isn’t simply drama
criticism, it tells a story about the gay com­
munity’s response to A ID S and the story of
how we have adjusted our lives throughout
these past years.
The book doesn’t dwell on interpretations
of A ID S plays in the more traditional sense of
drama criticism. I found that to truly honor the
work I needed to come up with a different way
of thinking about A ID S performance than sim­
ply claiming it was well-written or -performed,
or that it wasn’t. Instead, I consider the con­
text of the performance. What does this play or
performance tell us about our understanding of
A ID S in this particular historical moment?
Other issues also seemed more pertinent to
me than questions of artistic merit. What were
the kinds of performances emerging out of
queer communities of color? What are we to
make o f the proliferation of A ID S comedies
such a s Jeffrey or Love! Valour! Compassion! in
the 1990s? How are HIV-negative gay men rep­
resented in gay theater?
T he response of theater artists to the
A ID S crisis has been one of the real testing
grounds to see if theater can powerfully affect
our lives. What conclusions do you make as
you look at this rich history recounted in
A cts of Intervention ?
Throughout the book I am interested in
exploring the ways that performance shapes our
understanding of AIDS. The book takes a
proactive approach to theater. In other words, I
believe that performance really matters and
makes a difference in our lives. Theater holds
the potential to galvanize us into new forms of
consciousness.
The book documents the unique resilience
of gay culture in the midst of difficult and har­
rowing times. Writing this book has been my
own contribution to this resilience, my own
personal tribute to the tremendous generosity
of gay people during the last two decades.
■ A c ts of I n ter ven tio n : P erform ance , G ay
CULTURE AND A ID S by David Román. Indiana
University Press, 1998; $39.95 cloth, $19.95
paper.
TIM MILLER is a solo performer whose full -
evening theater works have been presented all over
the world. He is the artistic director of Highways
Performance Space in Santa Monica, C alif., and
he teaches at California State University, Los
Angeles, and Umversity of California Los Angeles.
His book Shirts & Skin is currendy available from
Alyscm Publications.
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