A POSTER OF THE COSMOS

The off-off-Broadway icon, Lanford Wilson, is one of the foremost dramatists in the experimental theater scene—a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright whose work often tells stories of those most marginalized in society. Wilson passed away in 2011, but his work is still performed today. Who We Become, presented by Deep Flight Productions and directed by Mark Cirnigliaro, is a series of one-act plays by Lanford Wilson. I witnessed “A Poster of the Cosmos” and “The Moonshot Tape”, but Who We Become also includes “Breakfast at the Track”.

“You don’t look like the kind of guy who’d do something like that.” Geoff Stoner says mockingly in “A Poster of the Cosmos”. Stoner portrays Tom, a pissed-off baker, sitting in a Manhattan police station undergoing interrogation at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Tom tells us many stories about his relationship to a man named Johnny. He started from when they were strangers, who then became friends, and then lovers.

Tom keeps us in the dark as to why he’s in the police station until revealing near the end of the play that Johnny is in the hospital due to AIDS. The reason for Tom’s arrest was that he disrobed completely and got into bed with Johnny. He licked his body, cleaning off all the blood on Johnny. In this act, Tom was taking care of Johnny when most were afraid even to breathe the same air as an AIDS patient. Tom
frightened the hospital staff, and they called the police. “Are you happy now?” Tom asks.

In the blackout, after the play ended, I heard the weeping of an older man beside me. While I was not alive during the AIDS epidemic, I saw how vital “A Poster of the Cosmos” is, especially right now, as there are constant efforts to silence, dismantle, and erase queer voices and history. “A Poster of the Cosmos” not only humanizes, but showcases the complexity of queer people, their lived experience, nuanced history, and trauma. Who We Become is on their way to Edinburgh for this year’s Fringe Festival, and I’m curious to see what it has in store for them.

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Frankie Lehr