Press
The AIDS Plays Project honours a lost generation of writers
The Financial Times
October 8th 2024“These are important writers from the margins of queer history,” says Matthew López, writer of the West End and Broadway hit The Inheritance and a mentor to Curtis. “Play by play, The Aids Plays Project is reshaping the queer theatrical canon.”
The second season will feature ‘PS Your Cat Is Dead!’, then a revival of ‘Christmas on Mars’ on December 1, World Aids Day, and finally in 2025 ‘Reasons for Staying’, a 1986 play by Irish writer Colm Clifford. It emphasises the project’s interest in riotous variety. Kirkwood, for example, wasn’t radically queer at all; the son of Hollywood stars, he was a relatively establishment figure who wrote work which flirted with gay themes rather than tackling them head-on.”
Written by Louis Wise
Alastair Curtis
(Photo: Henry Mills)
(Photo: Henry Mills)
London’s queer creatives: ‘We feel unsupported by the bastions of creativity like the National Theatre.’
The Evening Standard
May 30th 2024
“Around a blue-lit, shrunken stage at London Performance Studios last month, a bustling crowd of queers erupted into feverish, teary applause. A performance of Jerker, the 1986 play about phone sex during the AIDS pandemic by the late San Franciscan playwright Robert Chesley, had just concluded.
It was the spot to be that Saturday night, and only the latest in a string of evenings put on by The AIDS Plays Project, an organisation founded by Alastair Curtis ‘to revive parts of our archive or history’, he explains. As of last June, Curtis has been elbow-deep in research, digging out old plays and manuscripts written by those who lost their lives to HIV/AIDS, ‘many of which, 40 years later, have been marginalised or relatively forgotten’.
This momentum-building project is one of a number of grassroots, LGBTQIA+ performing arts set-ups currently bubbling across the city. Why? Curtis thinks people are turning their backs on the establishment. ‘We are largely unsupported by the bastions of creativity and theatrical innovation in London. In the absence of that ecosystem, we have to develop our own.”
Written by Joe Bromley
(Photo: Henry Mills)
The AIDS Plays Project is reviving the forgotten plays of writers who died of HIV/AIDS.
HERO
December 6th 2023In conversation with Alastair Curtis
Kondoleon won an Obie for Most Promising Playwright in 1983 for Christmas on Mars, which he shared with the playwright David Mamet. I thought: what a shame that a writer who was ceaselessly inventive and pioneering in his queerness has not entered the mainstream in the same way. He was part of a generation of New York playwrights, but because of his premature death in 1994 he hasn’t really had the legacy that he deserves.”
Written by Barry Pierce
Nathan Armarkwei-Laryea
in ‘Christmas on Mars’
(Photo: Tyler Kelly)
in ‘Christmas on Mars’
(Photo: Tyler Kelly)
Alastair Curtis on Rediscovering Plays by Writers Lost to AIDS
frieze
May 30th 2024In conversation with Alastair Curtis
We see it as our mission to highlight the careers of talented but lesser-known playwrights whose lives were cut short. We want to pay tribute to what they achieved in their lifetime, the plays they put out and communities that they were part of. And writers who were on the brink of fame that didn’t quite have the time or the attention to develop into the artists they could have been.
I think of it as a poetic restitution. Too often these plays live in the rarefied grip of academics. Access to these writers should not be the preserve of those with an education. The central gesture of our project is forging a connection between these writers and our queer community now.”
Written by Sam Moore
(Photo: Henry Mills)