🎭 PrideArtsChi presents a “smartly conceived” take on Donja R. Love’s play about being Black, queer, and HIV positive. | ✍️ Matt Simonette
, they’ll get a sense that their relationship with the actors for the next 90 minutes will be an unusual one. The actors are already onstage, stretching and otherwise preparing, as the audience sits down.
Following the performance, there is no curtain call. The show wants to disabuse any inclination to attach any of the three actors to any specific character. These aren’t really characters,“Shouldn’t we just tell them who we are so that they don’t see us as numbers?” asks one character at the beginning of the play.Through 3/19: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Wed 3/8 and 3/15 7:30 PM; Pride Arts Center, 4139 N. Broadway, 773-857-0222,’s title refers to the statistic that one in every two Black men who have sex with men will likely be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetime. Even as medical interventions preventing and treating HIV have become plentiful in many communities, American society has largely failed to connect resources stemming new transmissions of HIV with Black MSM. Playwright Donja R. Love’s script addresses those failures head-on, depicting three gay Black men in a formless waiting room, reflecting back on the life of a man named Donté who was living with HIV and eventually committed suicide., the audience is led through a small game that assigns a numerical value to each of the men in the waiting room; whoever ends up with number one portrays Donté. The night I saw the play “Person on the Left” ended up as Donté. The other men—“Person in the Middle” and “Person on the Right” —portray the individuals whom Donté encounters over the course of his life. Williams, Allsop, and Xavier all turn in extraordinary performances, which is even more remarkable given that each actor doesn’t know which of the roles they’ll be performing until the play has actually started.’s narrative progression; a character’s dialogue from Donté’s life might ease into an aside from one of the men in the waiting room. We’re told that Donté writes plays, and at a few points,suggests that this whole performance is him processing his own creation. The play stubbornly eschews any name but Donté’s; the characters embody only archetypes; Allsop at one point, for example, has to quickly change from a trick Donté meets online to Donté’s mother, aided only with a scarf and sweater.moving briskly, but he and the actors know where to find the raw energy and emotion in Love’s script. The only moment that didn’t ring true was an explosion of violence at one point near the end—the incident didn’t feel earned by Love’s story at that point and seemed shoehorned in to get the play one step closer to a conclusion. But that was one stumble in an overall smartly conceived, honest-feeling presentation. At one point,. The play doesn’t sentimentally presume the characters will easily gain the strength and wisdom to live with and heartily combat HIV. Indeed, when Donté shows up drunk for a blood test, his physician remarks, “Sometimes the hurt is a bigger virus than the HIV.”
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