What better venue than The Voxel—Baltimore’s own transformational, cutting edge, tech-lab theater—to carry you back in time? Though it may be precisely the time most of us would rather not revisit, in the hands of the Queer performance ensemble, Future Ghost, the journey is well worth taking.
With one of the most illustrative titles ever—the dance floor, the hospital room, and the kitchen table (I’ll get to that later)—the show revisits the AIDS crisis in America. Its story spans from the earliest days of the outbreak to how today’s aging Boomers, Millennials, and Gen X’ers view the present and the past through the lens of one of the worst pandemics since the Spanish Flu of 1918.
By way of background, the dance floor, the hospital room, and the kitchen table, written and directed by Lyam B. Gabel and further developed by the actors who perform it, Hannah Cornish, Owen Ever, and Frank Barret, grew out of a desire by the author to bring some light to not just the disease, but to the people who experienced and lived through this uniquely disastrous phenomenon.
The production includes a curated series of recorded interviews with some players who were on this field of nightmares through the chaotic days of its development and spread, navigating the maze of misinformation and fear. With the actual voices of some of the respondents, Gabel and company weave a tapestry of these stories, some real, some imagined with sequins and songs, but all moving and valid.
AIDS first emerged as a little blip on the gaydar screen around 1980 or so, give or take. There wasn’t much media coverage, and even among the gay community, we largely viewed it as a series of isolated incidents that seemed to be happening to some of the more promiscuous members of the tribe. I remember being at a cocktail party around then when we were laughing and joking about it, ascribing the ‘Gay Plague’ as maybe being caused by industrial carpeting and track lights (they were both all the rage with hip gays back then.)
The disease was originally going to be called ‘GRID’, (for Gay-Related Immune Deficiency.) When it spread to the Haitians, hemophiliacs through blood transfusions, intravenous drug users—showing up in hospitals and morgues—it still took years for the government to get involved. Movie star Rock Hudson’s death, Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor’s involvement, and then Elton John all helped focus attention on the disease. Still we heard little from the victims. They didn’t live long enough to tell their stories. What we did hear was the deafening silence of the Reagan administration.
