World AIDS Day Play

As a part of World AIDS Day, a new theatre work focusses on the experience of young gay men in the 1980s, revisiting the past without preaching to the present about the epidemic and its influence on Sydney’s gay community. “I’m trying to target two audiences,” The Death of Kings writer by Colette F Keen.  “The old guard and the younger community who have been lectured to and told ‘when I was young’ over and over again.”  Keen and Deusien previously collaborated on a verbatim piece telling the stories of the 9/11 first responders, but the origins of Death of Kings came about in a different way, when a friend of Keen’s made an off-the-cuff statement. “He’d been through the ‘80s in Sydney and he just said ‘I’m really frightened that 30 years on the people who survived are going to die and although we have oral history saved in libraries all we will hear are American stories.”  Built on interviews that took place between January and December 2012, the show tells the tales of a varied group of gay men.  For full story click here.