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Arts and Entertainment
‘Patient A’ Explores a Moment in AIDS History
According to HIV/AIDS non-profit AVERT, there may be as many as two million Americans, both diagnosed and undiagnosed, living with HIV or AIDS today.
With the advent of antiretroviral therapies, people with HIV/AIDS are living increasingly longer and healthier lives. As managing the disease becomes easier, its presence in the news media becomes diminished and public attention wanders. In an era when people are less and less concerned about exposure, it’s hard to remember that only a decade ago the United States—and especially the gay community—was in the midst of full-blown AIDS panic. Today, the public has grown complacent about the disease, complacent about exposure, complacent about treatment, and complacent about a cure. But AIDS—and hostile attitudes about those who have it—is alive and well in America today. Salt Lake’s Plan-B Theatre Company hopes to remind audiences of that when its season-closer, Lee Blessing’s Patient A, opens September 9 at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center.
Patient A tells the true story of Kimberly Bergalis, who became the first confirmed case of AIDS transmission from a healthcare worker to a patient when she was exposed to the virus by her dentist in 1992. The public outcry that followed opened up a major public discourse about HIV, homosexuality, healthcare, religion, and social justice. Blessing’s play about the case and events surrounding it premiered off-Broadway in 1993 at the prestigious Signature Theatre Company.
Patient A is equal parts fiction and docudrama, with much of the dialogue culled from interviews Blessing did with Bergalis shortly before her death. In addition to himself and Kimberly, Blessing created a third character, called Matthew, for the piece. An amalgam of Blessing’s real-life friends who died from AIDS, Matthew gives voice to the attitudes and feelings of the untold thousands of American men who have lived with the disease themselves or have watched those they love suffer and die from it.
As the production shows, the case was not without controversy. Bergalis was infected the same year that NBA star Magic Johnson came forward with his diagnosis, bringing about the kind of widespread media attention and research funding for which AIDS activists had been fighting for nearly a decade. Gay men noted bitterly that while hundreds of thousands of their community had died, AIDS patients found little sympathy from the public until a sports star and a pretty white girl were diagnosed.
Similar opinions are expressed through the play’s deconstructed form, which allows the players to move fluidly through the fourth wall as well as the confines of their characters—there are moments in the script when Kimberly or Matthew steps out of the story to confront Blessing’s storytelling techniques.
Although a lot has changed since 1993, Plan-B Producing Director Jerry Rapier feels the show is as relevant now as it was when it premiered more than a decade ago.
During a recent year spent as an event planner for the Utah AIDS Foundation, Rapier was shocked to find that after all this time, attitudes toward the disease and those who live with it have not changed much. “I was shocked to learn that there are still people out there who feel that AIDS is a punishment—and a fitting one—for gay men. One of the questions the play asks is whether finding a cure for the virus would bring about a cure for the fear and hate.”
Noting recent statistics that show sharp increases in both unsafe sex and HIV diagnoses, Rapier further registers his surprise at the number of gay men who know little or nothing about AIDS. “They have this attitude that if they get it, they can just take a pill and be fine. They don’t know that the drugs are cost-prohibitive even for people who are well-set financially. They don’t know that every body reacts differently to the medicine. They don’t know what living with AIDS is like.”
Rapier has taken a spare, “almost clinical” approach to his direction, with an aim toward recreating for the audience what life for an AIDS patient was like in the early 90s.
“Back then, there was no AIDS support group at the Center every Wednesday night. These people died lonely, quick deaths, often spending their last moments with strangers, outside the embrace of family,” he notes. Rapier hopes that spending some time in such an environment will inspire empathy and action in audience members.
In a three-handed show, good casting is essential, and Rapier has enlisted some of Salt Lake’s best talent for Patient A. He secured special permission from Blessing to allow Anita Booher (Plan-B’s The Laramie Project, Tooth and Nail’s Crave) to play Lee. She’s joined by Colleen Lewis (Egyptian Theatre Company’s Ruthless!) as Kim and Logan Miller, who recently appeared in Plan-B’s Slam, as Matthew.
Plan-B hopes to use the show as a springboard for reopening public discourse about AIDS in Utah. In conjunction with the play, the company has joined with Julie Brizzee/Your Lender For Life and the Utah AIDS Foundation to present an art show called Patient S. Curated by the Art Access Gallery, the show features the work of eight local visual artists and will hang in the corridor leading to the theatre. In addition, the company is setting aside two performances to benefit local AIDS organizations: the September 11 show for the People With AIDS Coalition of Utah and the September 18 show for the Utah AIDS Foundation. Tickets for these special performances are available through those organizations.
Rapier notes that one of the major themes addressed in Patient A is the idea that the HIV/AIDS plague is not a matter of the virus alone, but also of the plague of fear, intimidation and discrimination that the virus engenders. As Utah’s most socially-conscious theatre and one of its most honored—the company recently picked up SLAMMY Awards for Best Acting Company and Best Local Production, bringing its grand total to 21 since 2000—Plan-B is in a unique position to further the discussion that will one day end both. And that, regardless of the political and social controversies of her case, is a fitting legacy for Kimberly Bergalis.
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