And now a word from our sponsors. I MEAN, PRODUCER!

Hey all, we are super excited to kick off regular posting with a stop in from Allison Taylor, the Producing Artistic Director of Apple Core Theater Company. Let’s just shove on over and make her feel at home, all right?

A little bit of background: I asked Allison to tell us what led her and Walter to choosing AS IS for the fall production. After assuring me that it was NOT because Walter and the playwright share a last name (Hoffman), she sent me this piece.

Enjoy.

There are many difficult steps in a producer’s process. Now, I am not going to tell you that choosing a play is more difficult than marketing or fundraising. But if you want to fundraise, or do anything else for that matter, you better know why you’re producing your play.

 So why are we doing As Is, William M. Hoffman’s 1985 drama centering on the gay community of New York City as AIDS first broke out?

 Simply put, it’s a great play that after a plethora of major awards and nominations hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. Hoffman endows his characters with complexity and pathos, and he illustrates the frightening climate of the 1980s with accuracy and honesty. Even though it’s heartbreaking at times, it’s also a wickedly funny play. The drama’s sense of humor and the tender relationship at its center offer such hopefulness in the face of such a grave disease. What’s more, the timing to produce As Is seems right, as we happen to be celebrating the play’s 25th Anniversary. When we chose As Is back in late 2009, we honestly had no idea that Signature Theatre would be doing Angels in America simultaneously, nor that Joel Grey would be directing a 25th Anniversary reading on Broadway of The Normal Heart. But obviously, that doesn’t hurt either!

But more importantly, we chose As Is in the same way we chose our first production: Won and Lost, two one-act plays centering on American veterans as they grappled with their injuries, their unique experiences, and their loneliness. In late 2008 when we were figuring out our first production, you opened up a newspaper and you found headlines on President Obama’s election and the American economy’s implosion-in-progress. With these two major American events dominating mainstream consciousness, rarely did the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan even come up. And so, hoping to remind people of what was happening overseas, we chose a couple of plays — James McLure’s Pvt. Wars and Steven Gridley’s The Return of Odysseus — whose stories would have been on page B25 in the Times.

I read an article a few months ago that called HIV/AIDS the “forgotten epidemic.” Did you know that there are approximately 1.2 million Americans who are living with HIV/AIDS? That’s according to the Center for Disease Control. Did you know that HIV is the third leading cause of death for New York City residents aged 35 to 54? That’s according to the NYC Department of Health. And that’s just crazy. I certainly didn’t know that — not until I was inspired by the play and began to look into HIV/AIDS statistics.

We chose to produce As Is not just because it’s a beautifully written, moving play but because, sadly, it’s still too terribly relevant. If our production inspires just one person to make a donation to AIDS research or volunteer at a community center for people living with AIDS, then we’ll be pretty darn happy.

7 September 2010 ·