SAN FRANCISCO, APRIL, 1983. In one of the earliest spoken-word performances that theatrically represented AIDS in the United States, perhaps the first on the West Coast, an emerging playwright and stand-up comedian named Doug Holsclaw performed Eartha at the White House (later retitled Spice Queen) in a monologue competition sponsored by the One Act Theater Company at a county fair. Holsclaw wrote the piece after reading Larry Kramer’s impassioned call to action “1,112 and Counting,” which had been published in The New York Native on March 12. In an impeccably timed, angry, campy yet earnest soliloquy, Holsclaw’s saucy character narrated a story about his friend Jeffrey, a hustler who had died at a young age during the first year of the crisis. Describing their catty yet tender friendship, Holsclaw’s character joked about how Jeffrey, who “could be Cruella Deville sometimes,” would call him “paprika queen” or “Donna Reed like I’m bourgeois—because I garnish my salads” when they would picnic at Land’s End on Memorial Day. Pausing artfully for both comedic and dramatic effect, Holsclaw—originally from Nebraska and having recently settled in the Bay Area after five years in New York—charmed the audience with his seductive Midwestern cadence, twinkling blue eyes, flip confidence, boyishly campy swagger, and startling sincerity, leading the spectators through a series of catapulting emotions with his original eight-minute piece.
The monologue became both more irreverently sarcastic and rhapsodically poignant as it unfolded.
Reminiscing humbly yet proudly about this first performance of Spice Queen, Holsclaw (co-director of Unfinished Business: The New AIDS Show) told me: “In 1983, even in San Francisco, playing a nelly gay character was shocking and I was disqualified from the competition. There was such stigma and lack of information then; people didn’t know what to make of my monologue. But in 1986, The Village Voice called it a masterpiece.” Despite this initial aversion to its campier elements, a year later Spice Queen served as a climactic moment in the grassroots Bay Area ensemble theatre piece The AIDS Show, perhaps because it offered audiences an opportunity to simultaneously laugh and weep. Numerous reviewers of the play singled out Holsclaw’s piece for praise, including The Village Voice’s Robert Massa, who wrote in a review of a 1986 Manhattan production of Unfinished Business: The New AIDS Show: “Holsclaw’s performance of the monologue ‘Spice Queen,’ which he also wrote, is the evening’s clear highlight, a masterpiece of understatement and natural rhythms, a rare achievement in a crisis.”
With its sharp and heartbreaking humor, the monologue eventually reached U.S. audiences from coast to coast. Holsclaw’s bold and richly textured performance straddled and incited a panoply of emotions ranging from joyous laughter to existential frustration to catalytic rage to wistful yet passionate sorrow to queer fraternal love.
Originally intended to be educational agit-prop theatre and later reconceived by director Leland Moss, The AIDS Show was commissioned in 1984 by Theatre Rhinoceros cofounder and artistic director Allan Estes before his own death from AIDS-related infections at age 29 on May 26 of that year. On April 12, an article in The Bay Area Reporter had announced: “Theatre Rhinoceros has launched a Performance Workshop which will result in outdoor performances of a collectively-developed performance piece during Gay Pride Week and the Democratic National Convention. Under the direction of … Robert W. Pitman, the workshop will explore issues and themes related to AIDS.” Over forty writers submitted pieces for consideration. Those who had helped conceive the project voted to select pieces for inclusion. The show opened in mid-September 1984, a year before Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart and William H. Hoffman’s As Is received critical acclaim in New York.
Although Estes, Pitman, and C. D. Arnold originally envisioned The AIDS Show as street theatre, when Moss took over the project, he decided to design the play in a cabaret format with multiple vignettes instead. In November, Moss explained his reasons to Bernard Weiner in The San Francisco Chronicle: “The idea of street theater didn’t do it for me. […] that minimal approach always has seemed to me to be mostly preaching to the converted. I wanted something more creative that could work in a number of different places—hospitals, clubs, schools, etc.—bringing information about AIDS to groups who might otherwise not hear about it.”
Collaboratively realized, The AIDS Show was comprised of scenes and monologues written by thirteen gay and lesbian writers, including Paul Attinello, Bill Barksdale, Karl Brown, Dan Curzon, Ellen Brook Davis, Matthew McQueen, Markley Morris, Adele Prandini, Philip Real, Robert J. Stone, Dan Turner, and Randy Weigand Paulos, as well as Holsclaw and Moss. The group worked under the acronym A.I.D.S., which in this case stood not only for the disease, but also for the ensemble: “Artists Involved with Death and Survival.” Most of the writers also performed in the show. Other actors included Robert Coffman, Stacey Cole, Donna Davis, Mark Flora, Chuck Hilbert, Thomas-Mark, Keno Rider, and Sandra Schlechter.
The AIDS Show earned community support as well as critical praise. After the opening night, a reviewer from the Chronicle wrote on September 14th that the performance was:
high-class, professional, entertaining, and informative. … Under Moss’s inventive, fluid direction, the show moves from segment to segment, passing on important information about AIDS, all the while entertaining us with skits (some moving, some highly comic) and musical numbers. There is little of a uniform point of view, and several contradictions as to how to interpret the AIDS epidemic … but the temporary solution that comes through loud and clear, at least until a cure for the disease is found, is “safe sex.”
In 1984, Theatre Rhinoceros won a Community Service Award from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for producing The AIDS Show, as well a Cable Car Award and a special Bay Area Critics Circle Award. Many of the original actors stayed with the company when the show was revived and updated. Devised to be portable, the play was performed at numerous venues in San Francisco and toured successfully throughout the Bay Area at community centers, street fairs, jails, hospitals, schools, churches, Shanti Project training sessions, and several state universities. As noted, a second version of the piece called Unfinished Business: The New AIDS Show, ran in 1985.
By providing a space where audience members could affirm their experiences, the cast of The AIDS Show enabled a release of pent-up emotions. Holsclaw explained:
The AIDS Show opened this very spiritual communion for people who were collectively feeling the same grief, frustration, and anger. Many audience members described how it was both cathartic and validating to see characters on stage experiencing the same things they were going through in their lives. There were no other representations of the AIDS crisis in the media then that we could relate to. … During the run of The AIDS Show, the audience would laugh hysterically at the funny stuff, because laughter is a real release too, but then they would sob like babies. People would pop during the show, they would be eating popcorn one minute, and then they’d just explode. All this emotion that they had been trying to hold back would gush out and reverberate around the theatre.
Reminiscing about his experience as an audience member, AIDS activist and author Ed Wolfe confirmed Holsclaw’s statements about the power of the show for the gay community at that time:
I was a volunteer with the Shanti Project and as special gift to us, the actors came and performed the show for the volunteers and clients of the agency. The HIV antibody test was newly available, the magnitude of the epidemic was just beginning to be perceived … and the dying was beginning in earnest. It was a terrible, horrific period. And then there was The AIDS Show: A grieving mom hanging her laundry on a clothesline, a man smelling his dead lover’s shirts in the closet, a nurse heading for burnout, a gym clone in absolute (hilarious) denial, a man on a telephone, speaking to his friend in New York, describing what was happening here in SF. … I had already cried many times over what was happening, but I remember that it was during The AIDS Show that I was able to laugh, for the first time, about anything related to the epidemic.
Propelled by the positive response, the show toured nationally as well, with performances in Boston, Denver, Fresno, Minneapolis, New York, Sacramento, and San Diego. Writer-performer Randy Weigand Paulos recently commented about the response to the play’s longevity:
When we originally wrote the piece, we had no idea if it would run for longer than its initial two-weekend slot in the basement of the Rhino. The community response to the play was incredible, and the show ran for over two years in its various versions. We were flooded with literally hundreds of letters of praise. After the PBS documentary aired around the country, letters came from everywhere and everybody: teenagers, lesbians in their sixties. … Many thanked us for helping them grieve, helping them come out of the closet, or helping them realize that there could be hope and even laughter in a time when the gay community was living in a constant state of fear.
Co-produced by Robert Epstein and Peter Adair, the documentary was broadcast nationally in 1986 and 1987. A reviewer for The Los Angeles Times wrote: “With the ‘100% support’ of KQED, San Francisco’s public television station, the two film makers said they raised most of the $100,000 for the documentary within the gay community—from San Francisco cocktail parties and passing the hat in Omaha to political and social-service organizations such as Laguna Beach Out-Reach.”
After the tours and television broadcasts, interest in the piece grew even more. There were also numerous productions of the play in other U.S. cities by different casts. In The Bay Area Reporter from 1987, Kris Gannon, former director of Theatre Rhinoceros, stated: “Before we toured The A.I.D.S. Show almost no one outside of San Francisco, other than playwrights, had even heard of Theatre Rhinoceros. This year, gay theaters in Chicago, Dallas, Boise, and other theaters are staging their own productions.”
With their work, the A.I.D.S. ensemble used their theatrical pulpit to not only represent the crisis but also to literally choreograph the community’s response. Shepherding the audience into a cycle of mutual support, the ensemble opened (and sometimes closed) a space for mourning, shaped the next course of action, and educated audience members about safer sex practices. In a sexually liberated culture like that of queer San Francisco, there was no need to shy away from specifics. By including songs such as “Rimming at the Baths” and “Safe Livin’ in Dangerous Times,” the show unapologetically confronted taboo topics. Lacking Broadway ambitions, the show didn’t have to censor explicit material. Recalls actress Donna Davis: “At a time when people were literally dying of embarrassment, we were tossing condoms to the audience in the midst of a song-and-dance number. Many people saw the show repeatedly, bringing lovers, friends, and parents, and assured us that we had changed and maybe saved their lives.”
Perhaps most notably, the ensemble modeled the productive collaboration that’s necessary to cope with crisis, helping their audiences to find community. With The AIDS Show, the theatre proved that it can function as more than mere entertainment, becoming instead an active agent that re-envisioned queer culture and society. By staging the show at accessible venues, the ensemble literally brought theatre directly to its audience, defying the Western assumption that theatre requires an actual building. Designed for production with minimal technical needs, the migratory show reached a broader audience than it could if it demanded the more elaborate staging required by plays like Angels in America.
Holsclaw’s Spice Queen was only one of the show’s many powerful pieces. The AIDS Show took ensemble work to a new level, eschewing the individual genius’s point of view in favor of celebrating the diversity of perspectives within the writers’ collective. Other characters in the show included an apologetic pregnant sister who explains to her hospitalized brother that her husband has forbidden her to visit him again, a condemning fundamentalist reverend who believes that AIDS is a punishment from God, a nurse who judges the sexual practices of her patients but then is touched when she witnesses the care-giving performed by a patient’s long-term lover, a mother who finds solace and camaraderie with her son’s boyfriend, an aging drag queen who mistakes his liver spots for Kaposi’s sarcoma, and Weigand-Paulos’ sassy aerobics instructor who believes himself immune to the disease because he hangs out at juice bars with young men (rather than at leather bars with older men).
Significantly, the play opened and closed with scenes that featured a group of gay men living with AIDS who have assembled at a Denver restaurant overlooking the continental divide. These bookend scenes highlight the importance of community when coping with illness and foreshadow the expansive vision of the U.S. offered in Tony Kushner’s epic. With the opening line, the character of Michael spells out the play’s mission: “Let me tell you right now—my objective is to illuminate and not depress. I am here to tell you that there is a spirit which banishes all fear.” Later, a character (perhaps significantly) named Cal says, “So everyone can be involved in this conversation, I’d like to ask some questions.” The first scene demonstrates the value of friendship and affirms the significance of the audience as an assembly. Michael’s last speech in the final scene recapitulates this theme: “Looking back, I realize now that accepting that invitation to dinner that night was probably the first step in overcoming my fear. I could sit down to dinner with thirteen people with AIDS again. I could sit down with twenty. (He moves to rejoin the circle.) In fact, I think I could be a person with AIDS myself. It’s not so bad to be a person.”
Two other through-lines provide continuity and structure. The first is a series of ensemble scenes brilliantly written by Paul Attinello depicting parties on New Year’s Eve from 1981 through 1985. Reminiscent of Lanford Wilson’s early literary experimentation, the scenes are composed of scattered fragments of conversation between young gay men who misunderstand the disease to varying degrees. The second is a series of monologues written and performed by Leland Moss in which he portrays Murray, a gay man who describes the progression of the epidemic in successive phone conversations. Murray was inspired by the off-screen friend with whom Arnold chats on the phone in Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy.
In his first monologue, set in 1981, Murray cavalierly boasts about his promiscuous lifestyle, teasing his New York friend for being uptight and practicing only “vanilla” sex. In the second, Murray brushes off the subject when Arnold mentions the new “gay cancer” that has begun to afflict friends on both coasts. In his next speech, Murray describes taking in a homeless person with AIDS and caring for him until his death. When Murray cries aloud in emotional despair over the recent tragedy, we see only Murray’s response when Arnold instructs him to breathe deeply and calm down. The monologue ends with Murray admitting that he needs to change his lifestyle: “I don’t know, Arnold, it’s hard to meet people here, everybody’s kinda scared, you know? And I guess—I guess I never really knew how to meet people—in the daylight.” Thus, the piece highlights the problem of isolation when surviving a crisis.
In his final monologue, Murray reveals that he has been dating a man whose company he actually enjoys. He confesses that the potential couple has decided to wait for a few more dates before having sex: “It’s weird, the better I get to know him, the less I want to carry on like I used to.” Although he mourns the loss of his former fun a bit—“I do know I like being touched. But not anymore by strangers”—by the end of the monologue he reveals how coping with the disease has permanently changed him: “How long have we known each other? … I just wanted to say—in all that time, I don’t know if I ever told you—you mean a lot to me. Thanks. I love you too.”
Murray serves as a paragon of an adaptable, strong, nurturing, compassionate gay man in the 1980’s, a far cry from the self-centered, self-loathing characters in Mart Crowley’s 1968 play Boys in the Band or the ranting recluse in Lanford Wilson’s 1964 play The Madness of Lady Bright. In Attinello’s final New Year’s Eve scene, one character echoes the archetypal Leslie Bright almost word-for-word when he says, “Somebody please take me home, please.” This evocation offers the gay audience a lens through which to view this new moment. Produced in a different era with different problems, The AIDS Show reflected a new visible gay culture that was actually managing itself and surviving despite the crisis.
Demonstrating that the show was capable of evolving to serve its audience, The AIDS Show was remounted with new scenes reflecting developments in prevention and treatment. The writer-producers defied traditional theatre practice by heeding and adapting to audience critique. In the second version, a scene by Ellen Brook Davis featuring two female sex workers discussing safer-sex practices was added, in response to criticisms about the lack of representation of how AIDS afflicts women. To further address that gap, Holsclaw contributed “Wash and Set” about a naïve housewife who learns of the disease via the news about Rock Hudson, wrongly believing she can’t be affected in her suburban enclave.
Most performances were generally followed by talk-backs in which the cast would answer questions, relay information about safer sex, and distribute condoms to the audience. During these sessions, audience members would often respond by sharing their own stories, questions, and fears. In this way, the theatre became a place for collective storytelling, and audience members saw their own experiences as important and worth reiterating. By incorporating these narratives into its own ritualized performance, The AIDS Show expanded the capabilities of theatre. By inscribing the disease as a story or play, the show directed the audience to think of themselves as coping with the same crisis as the actors, challenging them to further responsibility, nobility, and generous interaction. If AIDS is a “show,” it is no longer something of which one must be ashamed; rather it is something that one must discuss for the sake of educating others. Also, if AIDS is a show that is collectively written, then the narrative’s end is not predetermined but instead dependent on the community’s behavior after the actors have left the stage. In this sense, the play provoked sustained action.
Appearing on the San Francisco stage in September 1984, The AIDS Show helped pave the way for not only other theatrical responses to AIDS (including those by Tony Kushner, Terrance McNally, and Paula Vogel), but also other socially conscious theatre ensembles such as the Tectonic Theater Project, Fringe Benefits, and Cornerstone Theater Company. The show responded to the horrors of mass death with a celebratory and sometimes bittersweet call for life. At a time when AIDS was popularly conceived by many religious leaders as “God’s revenge” against homosexuality, The AIDS Show intervened to rethink the disease as a social issue, offering models of group behavior to a shaken community.
In retrospect, the play serves as a potent reminder of the variety of active responses that were occurring beyond the apathetic attitudes adopted by the government, religious groups, and the mass media. At a time when politicians, including President Reagan, were completely ignoring the crisis, small grassroots groups such as San Francisco’s Artists Involved with Death and Survival were fighting the disease on multiple levels. By educating its audience about “safer-sex” practices and disseminating information about how the virus was spread, the ensemble helped to curtail infection rates, banish irrational fears, and assuage an emotionally devastated community. Although subsequent “second generation” AIDS plays received more critical acclaim in the 90’s and continue to command scholarly attention, it is important to remember and pay tribute to this network of Bay Area gay and lesbian artists who were among the first to confront the AIDS crisis in a theatrical medium.
The author would like to thank Doug Holsclaw, Randy Paulos, Donna Davis, and Ed Wolfe for their help with this piece.
Darren Blaney, PhD, is a performer and independent scholar who has taught acting and theater history at Pomona College, U.C. Davis, and U.C. Santa Cruz.
