The Way We Live Now

In The Way We Live Now: American Plays & the AIDS Crisis, editor M. Elizabeth Osborn brings together a collection of theatrical works that explore the devastating toll AIDS has taken on American society. First published in 1990 by Theatre Communications Group, Inc., this anthology reads like a living document from the frontlines. Few industries were as ravaged and nearly decimated by AIDS as the theatrical community, and this collection offers brave testimony from a diverse assortment of voices that detail the hardest years of the epidemic. The Way We Live Now chronicles a terrifying era of disease, death, political inaction, and the new reality with which millions of people now had to live. Nevertheless, it also serves as a dedication to those who lost their lives, to those who survived and thrived in spite of an initially grim prognosis, and to all the partners, families, friends, and colleagues who had to bury loved ones.

Drama critic Michael Feingold opens the collection with an introduction. He vividly sets the stage for the works that follow and the importance these works hold in modern theatrical history. AIDS, he writes, by its very nature is a difficult subject to approach in the theatre. It scatters "fates this way and that, truncating some lives and leaving others mysteriously carefree." Because of this, there is no one single AIDS experience. Everyone diagnosed or touched by the disease has a different relationship with it, making it a challenging topic to translate into the universal. But by sharing intimate stories, of characters both real and fictional, the authors of the pieces that comprise this volume illuminate what is at the heart of every AIDS diagnosis: a human being. And, as a result, "we unfreeze. Our sense of shared feelings, shared events, overcomes the numbness….If we can do that in art, then it can be done in life."

As Is by William M. Hoffman is the first of the ten plays featured in The Way We Live Now. It was one of the first mainstream plays to address the then-new AIDS epidemic. It explores the impact of AIDS upon a gay couple, Saul and Rich, and the treatment they receive from family, friends, and medical professionals.



A Poster of the Cosmos by Lanford Wilson is a one-act play, featuring just one character delivering a monologue. Set at a Manhattan police station, Tom talks to an unseen cop and confesses to the series of events that led Tom to kill his lover, Johnny, who was dying of AIDS.

In Safe Sex, Harvey Fierstein presents a one-act in which two men, Ghee and Mead, reunite in their on-again, off-again relationship. They discuss safer sex in the age of AIDS, with Ghee citing sexual caution as a mask for his own flagging libido. This confounds Mead, and the two engage in an emotional dialogue about the new sexual reality for the gay community.

The Way We Live Now's title piece is a theatrical adaption, by Edward Parone, of Susan Sontag's short story of the same name. It takes place in the early days of the AIDS crisis, with an unnamed man dying in a hospital bed and those around him discussing the disease and its impact upon the individual and society.



The next piece is an excerpt from Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Angels in America. The landmark work centers on a disparate group of people who are in some way affected by AIDS. Angels dissects the crisis through the stories of individuals, communities, and the nation as a whole, presenting an original theatrical opus that challenges our ideas of health and disease, love and loss, politics and religion, even heaven and earth. Ultimately, it challenges us to rethink what the theatre itself can be.

The Baltimore Waltz is Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel's theatrical response to her brother's death from AIDS. This excerpt chronicles a sister and brother, Ann and Carl, as they embark on a tour of Europe, seeking pleasure and escape and a cure for a terminal illness called ATD, or Acquired Toilet Disease. By parodying AIDS, the play allows the central characters an outlet for their pain and for the grief that will, in short order, become overwhelming.

In Andre's Mother, Terrence McNally tells the story of Katharine Gerard, a mother unable to come to terms with her son's death from AIDS. She aims her rage and grief at her son's partner, Cal; at her mother; and at her son himself. In the process, Katharine faces her own failings as a mother and learns not only to begin to accept her son's death but to accept who he was in life.



The other pieces in this collection are Jack by David Greenspan, Zero Positive by Harry Kondoleon, and an excerpt from Laughing Wild by Christopher Durang.