This abstract is from the cover of the book.
“AIDS begs the question we ask of all dread performances — when will this ever end?” asks David Roman in Acts of Intervention. “Performances always and only end, and once enacted they vanish, leaving their trace in the offical memory of performance we call theatre history.”
So many of the performers, playwrights, spectators, critics, tech people, and others participating in the collective production of AIDS performance have already vanished along with their performances. This is a book that attempts to deal with this history… a history in which people disappear, performances vanish, but AIDS still remains. The specific challenge is to find a way to introduce these performances in a way that will mark their passing and recover what can survive.”
Roman examines the ways that gay men have used theatre and performance to intervene in the AIDS crisis, drawing from materials that span the period from 1981 to 1996. He discusses dramatic texts and public performances—from cabarets and candlelight vigils to full-scale Broadway productions such as Angels in America and Rent — that have shaped, and been shaped by, the history of AIDS in national, regional, and local contexts. Acts of Intervention treats mainstream as well as alternative and activist forms of theatre, including solo performance, community-based projects, mixed-media events, activist demonstrations, and AIDS educational theatre initiatives.
Roman traces the ways in which performance and theatre have participated in and informed the larger cultural politics of race, sexuality, citizenship, and AIDS in the United States during the last 15 years. He demonstrates not only how the theatre has provided a forum for gay male responses to the epidemic but also the degree to which those responses have inturn shaped the ideological formation of AIDS. Acts of Intervention offers a new method for mapping the relations between AIDS and representation by combing interpretative strategies from performance theory, gay and lesbian studies, critical race discourse, and cultural studies.
By including performances whose official account has been largely neglected or forgotten, the book writes the full history of theatrical interventions in the AIDS epidemic. Because of many early performances about AIDS left little or no documentation, the task of constructing an AIDS theatre historiography confronts immediate problems and limitations. Rather than obscuring such limitations, Acts of Intervention considers their effects. It argues that the history of AIDS performance is located at the juncture of memory and disappearance, of mourning and survival, of representation and its impossibility in the context of epidemic loss.
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