| This dissertation examines ten plays by gay playwrights written and produced during the first decade of the emergence of AIDS as a source of narrative or thematic content on mainstream American stages. The plays and their authors are as follows: The Normal Heart by Larry Kramer, The Marvin Songs by William Finn, Eastern Standard by Richard Greenberg, Burn This by Lanford Wilson, The Lisbon Traviata and Lips Together, Teeth Apart by Terrence McNally, Beirut by Allen Bowne, The Baltimore Waltz by Paula Vogel, Prelude to a Kiss by Craig Lucas, and Marvin's Room by Scott McPherson. In these works, the dramatists either address the spectacle of the disease directly, as in The Normal Heart, or touch on the indirect effects of the epidemic, as in The Lisbon Traviata, or else fashion metaphoric treatments of AIDS, as in The Baltimore Waltz. In all cases, however, these plays either refrain from directly voicing the word "AIDS" in their texts or do so only after repeated and prolonged attempts to suppress or prevent its invocation. Through an analysis of these plays' texts, as well as the employment of extra-textual statements by their authors and relevant literary, scientific, historical, and cultural writings about AIDS, this dissertation explores how these playwrights silence the word "AIDS" and for what reasons they choose to deny or attempt to suppress a voicing of "AIDS" in their texts, even when they intend to evoke the spectacle of AIDS or the epidemic's cultural by-products. This analysis concludes that the reasons range from simple matters of historical and scientific accuracy, in some instances, to more complex factors influenced by dramatic structural concerns and a desire to challenge or subvert certain cultural constructions of the disease, most notably the derisive and problematic equation that AIDS = homosexuality. |
