centerpieces
Plays, Lies and Ticket Sales
"It was the beginning of the end of the world but not everyone noticed right away. Some people were dying. Some people were busy. Some people were cleaning their houses while the war movie played on television."

These are the opening sentences of Sarah Schulman's 1990 novel "People In Trouble," one of the first mainstream novels to deal with the AIDS epidemic. It is also the first novel to document AIDS activism--particularly the birth of ACT UP -- and the queer community's response to the syndrome. Schulman characterizes her novel as a work of "witnessing." She's also described listing hundreds of everyday manifestations of AIDS-drugs like AL721, beepers going off in restaurants to remind PWAS to take their medications, the shape and color of KS lesions, posters at ACT UP rallies--so that she could document what it was like to live at "the beginning of the end of the world."
Schulman's witnessing brings to mind a scene from Craig Lucas's 1990 film "Longtime Companion." In a brief montage, several of the characters read to one another the infamous "New York Times" article entitled "Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals" of July 3, 1981. To watch that scene today is to feel the verification of a momentous event. Set in Manhattan's gay environs, "Longtime Companion" explores, with horror and compassion, the reactions of a group of friends facing their own mortality and that of their loved ones.

It is these acts of witnessing--of observing simply what happens and how people respond--that have enabled both Schulman and Lucas to create resonant and truthful works of art. Indeed, both Schulman and Lucas have helped to invent our cultural discussion around the epidemic and its myriad ramifications. We turn to the arts and philosophy to find new ways of conceptualizing everyday life; to find explanations and solace, politics and activism. As artists, Schulman and Lucas have shown us how to see and act.
Aside from "People in Trouble" Schulman--who was active for many years in ACT UP, bringing to that group her experience with feminist health organizing--has written and lectured about AIDS organizing and art. Last year she published "Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America," an analysis of how mainstream culture appropriates, commercializes, and distorts both queer- and AIDS culture. Its inception was the realization that the plot of Jonathan Larson's hit musical "Rent" was stolen, in part, from "People in Trouble."

Craig Lucas's "The Dying Gaul" opened off-Broadway last year to rave reviews--save one very important one (which we discuss below.) In it, a gay screenplay writer is convinced by a closeted producer to change his autobiographical AIDS story to a heterosexual story--only to begin receiving advances from the producer and online messages from his late lover. Lucas replaced the themes of community and love that were the backbone of "Longtime Companion" with those of loss, regret, betrayal, and murderous rage.
Over the past six months Lucas, as director, and Schulman, as playwright, have produced a series of staged readings of Schulman's new play "The Child." Structurally complex and politically and socially challenging, "The Child" tells the story of a 15 year old, gay boy trapped in a toxic family dynamic and an escalating world of violence following his parents' discovery of his sexuality and his involvement in an affair with two older men. His story is interwoven with those of the older men's two lawyers: one a gay man with AIDS now on protease inhibitors and re-entering the professional-realm of the living, and the other a lesbian who is dealing with a potential breast-cancer diagnosis and a fickle lover of many years. With its themes of intergenerational sex, abandonment, death, children's sexuality, and the destructiveness of the biological family to gay people, "The Child" is a startling and provocative collaboration. It may or may not be "the beginning of the end of the world", but both Schulman and Lucas are observing, witnessing and making us pay attention.

- Michael Bronski

Lies
Bronski: When we talk about AIDS and theater, we are talking about a very specific period since the mid-80s. How do you see the political climate shaping those early works?

Schulman: Actually, the political context of Robert Chesley's "Night Sweat" in 1984 and Craig's "The Dying Gaul" of last season is not that far apart. But in between there were a lot of lies.

Bronski: What kinds of lies do you mean?

"The Dying Gaul" 		Schulman: I mean that AIDS theater started with the truth of justifiable rage and got waylaid into a lot of pandering. A lot of pleading for tolerance. And then, later, even worse, it tried to make straight people feel good about themselves.

Lucas: I don't think in terms of lies and truth, because people have different experiences based on where they sit and what they have seen. All I ever try to do is put on stage or film what I would want to see. What people say about it is entirely [a product of] their own experience and aesthetic. I have had moments of serenity in the midst of all this horror and I have had moments of boundless rage, and they were both honest. What I might see as pandering--a movie by Spielberg--may in fact be what he truthfully feels. It may not ring true for me. But my father, who was in World War II, finds "Saving Ryan's Privates" very honest and truthful. To me it is hectoring, nationalistic, and unbearable. I get very bristly when people talk about truth versus lies.
Schulman: Yes, but what about an early work like Alan Bowne's 1986 "Beirut?" It used straight protagonists and was completely metaphorical. Or the film "Philadelphia" by Ron Nyswaner? Or any number of other pieces likes David Rabe's "A Question of Mercy," or "Rent." They very deliberately told a skewed story.

Lucas: Well, I hated them all, but "Philadelphia" was written by a gay man. So for me to say it was a lie seems preposterous. I happen to have found it unbelievable, which is a different matter. And "Beirut" was hysterical, but Alan Bowne was also a gay man and that is the way he felt about the epidemic. To brand him a liar or call his work dishonest seems presumptuous.

Schulman: And Clarence Thomas is black. So what? We all know--as you discuss in "The Dying Gaul"--that gay people can sell out their own just as efficiently as anyone else. I mean, we all know...

Lucas: I would never presume to say that Clarence Thomas is selling out his own people. I know black people who support him, and aren't they his people? We mustn't presume to speak for a general populace.

Schulman: ... that there are writers who write things for money and fame that are not the true reflection of their lived or felt lives.

Lucas: We don't represent anyonebut ourselves. My work speaks for me, period, not for all 'gay people' or 'queers.'

Schulman: Wait a minute. Craig, you must acknowledge that a person can write an ad for Scott towels and not really like Scott towels, right? They do it for money, prestige--all kinds of reasons.

Lucas: Advertising is not art. And art is not advertising.

Schulman: Having lived for twenty years as an artist I know for a fact--and I think you do too--that people make calculations about the content of their work. And some people calculate more than others.

Lucas: I think there is only good or bad art. It either speaks artfully and coherently from its own subjective point of view or it doesn't. I would not presume to judge anyone's motives, or calculations, even if what they write seems loathsome to me. I can't get inside their heads.

Schulman: Unfortunately a lot of what is published or produced is advertising; advertising for a value system that pays handsomely.

Lucas: Yes, but plenty of art that makes no money or is not written to make money is also pandering.

Schulman: Okay. So you do agree that some art is pandering?

Lucas: It seems that way to me, but I don't say the person who wrote it meant to pander or to lie.

Sarah Schulman 		Schulman: Yikes. That's not what I'm talking about. Give me time to say my piece here. Ron Nyswaner wrote "Philadelphia" and created a story in which there is no gay community and there are no gay lawyers. Gay people are dependent on benevolent straight people to protect them and these straight people are so kind and fair. Nyswaner is deliberately stringing together a list of outrageous lies that every homosexual knows is not true. The only people who would ever want to hear those lies are straight people who can't critique themselves. It is impossible that someone like Ron Nyswaner could actually believe this junk.

Lucas: The guy is a homo, and his movie spoke to millions of gay people. I know plenty of gays outside of New York who don't feel part of a community at all and who adored that movie.
Schulman: You are talking about two entirely different issues here. Let's separate them. First, is the scenario of "Philadelphia" true? That helpless weak gay people are dependent on benevolent homophobes to help them because there is no gay community? And secondly, why do some gay people like the film in spite of this misrepresentation?

Lucas: But "true" for who, Sarah? My late lover Tim, a gay man with AIDS, had no sense of himself within the gay community, so he would only go to a straight lawyer. All I am saying is that as an artist and a citizen I only speak for myself, never for my community.

Schulman: Craig, honestly--because I did not know Tim--if he had been fired by his hospital for having AIDS, would he not have looked around in the community of professional gay men to find out who...

Lucas: He was fired from NY Hospital and he did exactly nothing about it, because he felt helpless....

Schulman: ...the best lawyer was?

Lucas: ... he did grow over time and learned. But he didn't start there. And his experience wasn't a lie just because it wasn't evolved.

Schulman: So, Craig, the community of professional gay men that you depicted in "Long Time Companion," wasn't that your experience?"

Lucas: Professional men? One of them worked in a gym. One sold vitamins for a living. They were my experience, but people accused the movie of being a lie for that very reason. And when I write a woman character or a black character, it is only a shadow of my experience.

Schulman: I'm confused. Are you saying that you and Tim did not have a gay community?

Lucas: No, no. I'm saying that people create their own realities, to some extent, and if my reality doesn't conform to someone else's, it doesn't make my worldview a lie! There are so many gay artists purporting to speak for their community, and many of them--Edmund White, Larry Kramer and others--strike me as being reprehensible and having nothing to do with me.

Schulman: Well, I guess we just disagree. I know from my own experience that many artists deliberately depict a vision other than which they know to be true in order to advance themselves professionally and that in this process many truths about AIDS and gay people have been distorted or obscured.

Lucas: Frankly, I think that's a paranoid analysis. People try to do their best in art, don't they? They are sometimes limited or frail or misguided, but I wouldn't accuse them of deliberately lying. Maybe I'm being naïve.

Schulman: But that's what happens in "The Dying Gaul." The gay producer wants to create dishonest work because he himself is lying about his own life, about being gay.

Lucas: Yes, I know, but Robert doesn't think he's lying. He convinces himself he's telling the truth. But I concede the point! You have hoisted me on my own petard.


Craig Lucas 		Critics and Audiences
Bronski: Craig, what was it like to write "The Dying Gaul" after "Long Time Companion?" In an era that is so different from--and in many ways more confusing than-the moment when you wrote "Longtime Companion?"

Lucas: They were both hard. There were no movies about AIDS when I started writing "Long Time Companion" in 1986 and by the time I wrote "The Dying Gaul" there were no plays about it that reflected my experience. In both instances I assumed I would not get produced. And in both instances it was a huge, endless, tiring and infuriating struggle. And at the end of the struggle is a crowd of people waiting to tell you what you did wrong and how your writing doesn't reflect their experience! Peter Marks in his "New York Times" review of "The Dying Gaul," Vincent Canby in his "Times" review of "Longtime Companion" even the "Village Voice."
Schulman: Wait, what did "The Village Voice" say?

Lucas: That "Longtime Companion" was a terrible movie. A sell out, a rip off and a lie! The "Voice" and Canby objected to the perceived class of the characters I chose to dramatize. They were not the people of the fashion-moment.

Bronski: Craig, how do you feel Peter Marks of the "Times" mistreated "The Dying Gaul?"

Lucas: It was the best reviewed play of my entire career; it got better reviews across the board than "Prelude to a Kiss." But these overwhelming raves were meaningless in the face of this idiotic review in "New York Times."

Schulman: Why didn't he get it?

Lucas: Who knows? He wanted to see a "nice" play with a happy uplifting ending and he likes gay people to be nice and not scary or murderous. I may kill him myself.

Bronski: Do you think that the "Times" review prevented a longer run?

Lucas: Absolutely, without a doubt.

Bronski: So the "Times" can actually control what gets said about AIDS on stage?

Lucas: Of course! The "Times" controls everything that gets said on stage. There are no plays in existence that had anything important to say and survived a bad review from the "Times."

Schulman: Well, the thing is--creating public discourse will, in the long run, help the next people who come along. But it fucks up the person who had the guts to open up the pandora's box.

Bronski: So how do artists create art about AIDS that is true to their own experience and may speak to others and yet please the "Times?"

Lucas: No serious play ever has.

Bronski: Sarah, could you talk about "People in Trouble" and the process you went though writing it, as well as the reception it received. Particularly from gay men?

Schulman: Actually, none of my fiction has ever been controversial.

Lucas: Sarah, none of your fiction has ever been controversial? This is irony! Sarcasm?

Schulman: No, I mean it. My problems have come from my citizenship. My fiction has basically never surfaced to a place of enough visibility where people who don't like it have to engage it. Gay male readers of "People in Trouble" seem to have liked it.

Lucas: You mean, you don't even get to sit at the grown ups' table and have a fight about it? You have so many books in print and are so widely read, it's hard for me to understand.

Schulman: I don't think it's a problem.

Lucas: You like not being "visible?"

Schulman: I feel happy about how readers feel about my books. My conflicts have had to do with my citizenship in other matters.

Lucas: What do you mean by that?

Schulman: Okay, the novels are what they are. Some are better than others. I know that they are important to the people who read them. And I am trying to be a better writer. That's separate. The social question of who is the representative- or emblematic American, and which works are an organic part of American intellectual life, is an entirely different matter. It is a material, political matter that gets transformed by social discourse. This is separate from the books themselves. In other words, the artistic process of writing a novel is separate from the political process of how that novel is contained.

Bronski: But the containment happens because your content is unacceptable to many people in the mainstream media. It relates to what you were saying before about straight people wanting to hear lies. And it gets even more complicated talking about AIDS, which is so easily sentimentalized and sensationalized

Schulman: As far as I know "People in Trouble" was the first novel about AIDS activism. It was the first piece of witness fiction about the AIDS crisis. It is true that at first some women did not understand why I was compelled to do this. But I think they came to understand as the years passed. So I think that can change. I am an incredible optimist. That's how I find the strength to fight.


"The Dying Gaul" 		Today and Tommorow
Bronski: Where are we now in theater that deals with AIDS?

Lucas: The commercial theater is afraid of AIDS because it has lost its sensational ticket selling appeal.
Bronski: And where does "The Dying Gaul" and "The Child," Sarah's new play which you are directing, fit into this?

Lucas: It is hard to say. This isn't something I think about. Commercial theater is solely about fashion and sensation.

Schulman: Perhaps because so many lies have been told about how great straight people have been in the AIDS crisis, there may now be some small space for some reality.

Lucas: At heart "The Child" is what I would want to see when I go to the theater. It engages me and troubles me and makes me wonder.
Bronski: Will audiences come? Whose reality do successful plays reflect?

Lucas: The people who buy the tickets. At this moment, gay bashing is in the news, so Moises Kaufmann, who wrote "Gross Indecency," and others are doing work about Matthew Shepard. They are sensing the climate and following the polls.

Schulman: But this is an experience that belongs to everyone. The experience of being cruel and scapegoating others is a widespread experience, even if it goes unacknowledged.

Bronski: Craig, what is it specifically about "The Child" that drew you to it as a director?

Lucas: I loved the play's dryness, unsentimentality, humor, specificity, its structural playfulness, its sprawl. And Sarah's unwillingness to play by the "agreed upon" rules.

Schulman: Aw shucks.

Bronski: What rules? Of form? Content?

Lucas: The "rules" are you have to have a single protagonist and an uplifting ending. And jokes every two seconds. Sarah violates all of those with multiple protagonists, a highly realistic ending. And no cheap jokes.

Bronski: What spoke to you about the play?

Lucas: It was the isolation of the little boy. The real tension and crackle of the lesbian relationship. The line by line writing. The same things that appeal to me in Tony Kushner's work--especially, maybe, the loneliness.

Bronski: Sarah, when you were writing "The Child," how did you imagine the AIDS material would play?

Schulman: I don't know. I don't think that way when I am writing.

Bronski: I was thinking, in particular, of the theme in the play that deals with the fairly new, very specific "problem" of gay men with AIDS thinking they are going to die soon, and now living much healthier lives because of protease inhibitors.

Schulman: I just noticed that with the crisis changing, men were coming back into their power. I guess it is part of the ongoing witness experience I talk about in writing "People in Trouble."

Bronski: How was it writing about AIDS in "The Child" now, after having written "People in Trouble" in 1990 and "Rat Bohemia" five years later? Both of them broke ground dealing with AIDS in fiction. What has happened since then?

Schulman: The most pressing thing for me now, personally, is the consequences of the abandonment experience on the emotional lives of the survivors.

Lucas: Curiously, though that is my own experience, that isn't the part of the play that drew me in on a core level.

Bronski: "The Dying Gaul" is also about abandonment. Can you talk about that -- emotionally and psychologically--in relationship to "The Child?"

Lucas: I wrote "The Dying Gaul" in nine days, a white heat, and I wanted to make the audience burn with it. That's all I cared about. I think both plays say on some level "we are not going to be nice and go quietly."

Schulman: Craig, a technical question: How the hell do you write a play in nine days?

Lucas: Coffee.

Schulman: I usually spend 3-4 years on a novel!

Bronski: What do you think would make a strong, powerful, truthful play about AIDS now?

Schulman: Work that does not distort the AIDS experience to make straight people feel comfortable. Which is something I think a lot of gay writers do and Craig thinks they don't. They just can't help it.

Lucas: I don't worry about straight people, I worry about myself. I like work that doesn't make me comfortable.

Bronski: The AIDS epidemic has changed several times over the years with new drugs, shifts in reporting, activism and organizing, etc. Has this change been reflected in theater or novels?

Schulman: Not yet.

Lucas: I think it has, but the stuff that gets the really big funding tends to be more removed from the nitty gritty. Larry Kramer's "The Normal Heart" is an exception. I think, because it had the feeling of coming from the front. And, of course, that upset the "nice" critics who balked at the "artlessness" of it, while being incapable of entirely dismissing the play.

Schulman: Michael Cunningham's "The Hours," which won the Pulitzer Prize, is still set in the time of KS and wasting syndrome. I think many people find that comforting. I don't know how straight people will respond to the rebirth of the robust homosexual.

Lucas: I love that--the "robust homosexual." Excellent. That's what I want to see dramatized--the powerful homos. I think we should scare them and be as powerful as we want to be.
Michael Bronski is a cultural critic and journalist whose writings on film, theater, sex, AIDS, and politics have appeared in print, and online, in such publications as "The Village Voice," "The Los Angeles Times," "Z," "Radical America," "The Boston Phoenix," "The Boston Globe," and "Out." His essays are collected in more than forty anthologies and he is the author of the groundbreaking "Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility" (1984), and the widely praised "The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash and the Struggle for Gay Freedom".