A lost generation, found onstage
In both Queer Theatre Archive and Exeunt today: how The AIDS Plays Project is expanding the queer canon
This is a joint publication between Queer Theatre Archive and Exeunt - the lifeblood of independent UK theatre criticism, recently revived on Substack.
By Kate Wyver
Alastair Curtis is in the business of revival. The writer and director is the creator of The AIDS Plays Project, an impressive act of queer archaeology giving new life to shows written by playwrights who died of AIDS. Over the last two years, this patient DIY project has begun to expand the queer theatrical canon, re-staging stories from a lost generation with regular seasons of rehearsed readings.
This is no dusty academic staging of old texts, but a deep dive into the lives and works of these men: much of Curtis’ research has been unearthing personal connections to the writers. He had been struggling to find a friend or family member of the American playwright Alan Bowne, when through a stroke of luck he was put in touch with Barbara Hayes. She was Bowne’s best friend and towards the end of his life, his primary caregiver. “They lived together in San Francisco,” Curtis grins, “and had some sort of ‘mostly platonic’ ménage à trois thing with this other hot guy.” When the two of them talked about Bowne, who died from AIDS in 1989, Hayes said: “I think he’s come to life between us.”
“That’s the thing you can’t get in the archive,” Curtis says when he tells me about the two friends. “Suddenly, he came into focus, and I appreciate his writing a lot more. I want to know these people in a way that's more intimate than just the dates and the plays they wrote.”
The project started not with the plays, but with photographs of the playwrights. Curtis had been looking through the works of Peter Hujar and Robert Giard when he noticed a pattern. Several of the artists’ subjects, their portraits monochrome and moody, were queer playwrights. He began to track down the plays by these men, whose names had largely become obscure to us. Some were well-known, some had one hit-wonders, and others had been almost entirely forgotten.
At the start, there were just three names:
Charles Ludlam
Harry Kondoleon
Robert Chesley
“I’d look in every archive,” Curtis says, talking from the East London warehouse he shares with friends. “I was looking at who these writers knew, who they slept with, who they were inspired by.” Gradually, the writers’ outlines, hazy from history, started to become more defined. Ludlam was the best known of them; he had founded New York’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company and when the New York Times published his obituary, it was the first time a newspaper had named AIDS as a cause of death on the front page. Kondoleon was an off-Broadway sensation but only had one play performed in the UK, posthumously, and Chesley was a San Franciscan playwright with one play that occasionally rears its head over here, but whose other works have been largely ignored.
As Curtis researched, new groups and networks emerged. His list of names grew to 40. The majority of these voices were American, but some were French, some Italian, some British. “I was stunned by how brilliant they were,” Curtis says of the plays he started to read. Yet none of them were being staged – and he didn’t think they would be on main stages; they’re uncommercial, beautiful oddities with their roots far away from the mainstream.
But having found them, he couldn’t let them go again. “What’s happening to these writers and these plays if they languish in the archive?” he wondered. “They exist in a rarefied, academic space, which is not where I feel comfortable, and not where I think the plays really work.” He wanted to create a space for the plays to find their homes onstage again. “I mean, these plays come alive with queer audiences.”
Discovering the limits of the archives, he found the real gold in the details gleaned from the playwrights’ friends, lovers and professional contemporaries – and those who were a mix of all three. Don Shewey, a good friend of Kondoleon, was a theatre reviewer for The Village Voice in the 80s. “I began talking to him about the writers we’re looking at,” Curtis says, “and he suddenly opened his diary and was like, ‘Look! I reviewed all these plays! I can tell you which ones are bad and which ones are good.’” Shewey put Curtis in touch with more people who could help fill the gaps of these writers’ lives.
The day before we talk, Curtis chatted with drag performer and playwright Charles Busch. “We ended up talking a lot about Ludlam and the list of playwrights,” he says, “and he was just like, ‘Oh, I had dinner with that person, or I had lunch with that person, or I saw that person at a sex party.’” So many of the clues have been ephemeral and personal details like these, things that slip out of the realms of official memory. “When it’s going well,” Curtis says happily, “it feels like gossiping.”
Earlier this year, The AIDS Plays Project staged Reasons for Staying, a 1986 play by Colm Ó Clúbhán. Curtis had tracked down Mary Evans Young and Derek Evans, good friends of Ó Clúbhán, and who had lived with him in a squat in South London. Reasons for Staying was never published back in the day, but the pair had safeguarded their friend’s legacy for 20-odd years. “They have all of his belongings in a small box in their loft,” Curtis says, “which I went to Banbury to go and look through. Talking to them about Colm was honestly so brilliant, because immediately they were going, ‘Let us tell you all the gossip and the scandal. Let us tell you about the time he dressed up as a local Labour MP to berate them on the poll count day. Let us tell you about the time he went on protest in high heels and towered above people at the Pride march.’ All these stories.”
Curtis – proud and terrified – brought them to see the show, and took them backstage to meet the actors. “The show went up late because they just spent the whole time nattering about Colm. It meant so much to the actors, and it meant so much to Mary and Derek to see actors taking their riot friend’s writing seriously.”
This project is as much about the people as the plays. “It is a ruse to get to talk to these people,” Curtis admits freely. “Not only for the gossipy bits of history. But growing up queer, you’re so deprived of people older than you who’ve done what you’ve done. We only live in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic, but there is something really important about finding people I can look up to, and take inspiration from, not only in the work they make, but in the lives they lead.”
He hopes the project will have a positive impact on queer theatre today. As he was reading, he kept placing his creative friends and the wider queer artistic community – beyond theatre and into photography, art, fashion, music – in the onstage and offstage roles. “What if Max Allen and Elliott Adcock could design this play? Or what if Sharon Le Grand could narrate this play? Or what if Sue Gives A Fuck could be Marguerite Gautier in this play?” He admits it’s not an efficient way of curating, but says, “I’ve found I get a real kick out of connecting people I think are brilliant.”
The project’s next season is about to begin, hosted at London Performance Studios, where Curtis is an Associate Artist. The programme of rehearsed readings kicks off with the world premiere of Bowne’s 1985 play Spook, “a campy John Waters-esque romp through the 19th century with a love quartet and the ghost of a bisexual smuggler. It’s pulpy, it’s frothy, and it’s very silly.”
The season continues with a series of guest directors taking on a reading of three shows, with 1992’s Milo Lookingale by Jim Jewell, which looks at what it means to survive the crisis, and will be read by Dickie Beau. Then follows 1990’s Only The End of the World by Jean-Luc Lagarce, about a man who returns home to tell his family he is dying, and Reinaldo Povod’s 1986 play Cuba and His Teddy Bear, which went to Broadway with Robert de Niro. “It’s sublime,” Curtis says. “It has shades of David Mamet and Harold Pinter.” December will see the UK premier of The Rights by George Whitmore, set on Fire Island just before the announcement of the AIDS crisis.
When he talks about these shows, Curtis notes a difference between a gay play and a queer play. “I find the label ‘gay play’ a little narrow. For me, it often means male, middle-class, white and cisgendered,” he considers. “It risks being depoliticised, focused only on sexuality and its expression without questioning or subverting the systems of power we’re up against. And I think the theatre we’re trying to make feels 'queer', rather than ‘gay’, because it’s about politics, community, and our liberation.”
His list is now up to around 60 writers. Some are proving much harder to track down, but he is determined. “It’s genuinely the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done,” he says. “Maybe there’s a weakness that we don’t know what the future could be for it, but I think the future is the next show.” The money comes from funding from London Performance Studios as part of their Associate Artist status, plus donations from GoFundMe, with the aim to get private investors. They’ve never had any luck with the Arts Council. “But then, who has?” They keep ticket prices low, with money going back into the shows, and there’s a lot of working for free. “We get through it by hook or by crook,” Curtis shrugs. People keep showing up, getting off, going out, and signing up for the next slice of this living queer archive.
“It might be the fact that everyone’s tipsy at the bar,” Curtis says, searching for the right example, “or the fact that you can feel people cruising each other.” He is trying to pinpoint what exactly it is that feels so good about being in a room full of queer people who have gathered to watch plays that no one has staged in decades, and who most of the people in the room have very little knowledge of. “There’s a certain feeling of solidarity,” he decides, “of watching our community see themselves, or parts of their experience, and be able to search through history together.”
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