BLACK, QUEER & HIV+
Playwright Love’s tale of overlooked issues extended on stage
Playwright Donja R. Love wanted to write a show about a topic underrepresented onstage — and audiences have responded.
His play “soft,” about life, death and HIV at a correctional boarding school, just had its run extended for the second time at the MCC Theater in Hell’s Kitchen.
The show, which opened on June 9, was supposed to close
June 26, but was extended, first to July 10, and now through July 17.
“It’s beautiful and I’m in a bit of shock,” Love — who identifies as Afro Queer — told the Daily News. “I’m just really overwhelmed that it’s been received the way that it is and that people want to see it and are coming to see it.”
The acclaimed production is part of a new wave of theatrical works that explored the often-untold narratives of gay, Black men, which included Michael R. Jackson’s “A Strange Loop,” the winner of the 2022 Tony Award for best musical.
While Black male queerness is the primary theme of Love’s works — which include his Manhattan Theatre Club debut “Sugar in Our Wounds” — the virus that causes AIDS is included in his latest ones.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the playwright’s “one in two” centered on what Love called “a hidden state of emergency” in the Black LGBTQ+ community: the 2016 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report revealing that one in two Black men who have sex with other men will be diagnosed with HIV.
Love, 36, told The News that after his own diagnosis in 2008, the virus became intertwined with his artistry.
“For me, it was a no-brainer. Writing is therapy for me,” he explained. “And as I was navigating at the time, what it meant to have depression, what it meant to navigate alcoholism, and like suicidal ideations, writing was the thing that was really helping me.”
“And then I started to realize, ‘Oh, I actually don’t see stories about Black people living with HIV, onstage,’ ” he added. “All of the stories that I see onstage and even onscreen about people living with HIV, by and large, center on whiteness. And for me, I started to put two and two together, which was, ‘Oh, this is why the numbers look the way that they do; it is not just lack of education, lack of health care, medical racism, it’s not just poverty and not redlining.’ These aren’t the only things that as Black people are affected by HIV at disproportionate rates. It’s also the lack of representation because we don’t see ourselves, our stories on stages, and we don’t see our stories on the screen. ”
“[White people] get to see themselves, overcoming and surviving and thriving,” he added. “We don’t get to see ourselves at all.”
Love, who graduated from Juilliard’s Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights program and taught writing at John Adams High School in Queens and Bronx Theater High, started to take matters into his own hands once he realized he had a platform.
The topic of HIV comes up in “soft” after one of the program’s most promising students dies by suicide.
The show stars rising theater actor Biko Eisen-Martin as a passionate teacher. The young actors like Travis Raeburn, Essence Lotus, and Dario Vazquez bring a level of raw and refreshing authenticity to their roles as teenagers.
“We wanted to show that anyone in our community can contract HIV, that you can look any way and you can still live with HIV,” Love said. “We didn’t want to think of having a 30-year-old as a teenager. So we wanted to make sure that we had actors that were close to the age range of the student characters.”
As Love’s works continue to reach new audiences, he wants people to know that real work and advocacy for people with HIV and AIDS is being done.
“Everyone living with HIV doesn’t have to take on the life mantle and doesn’t have to pick up the baton of being loud and being public with HIV,” he said. “So for those folks who decide to still exist in their fullness and in their truth, but not in a very loud way, that is A-OK.”