How a Student-Directed Production Became a Cosmic Cup of Coffee with Our Queer Ancestors

Entering our senior year at Drew University, we found ourselves with the opportunity to co-direct a play. The two of us met three years prior. We quickly realized that we both come from a movement-based background, share an enthusiasm for collaborative processes, and strive to create theatre art that centers queer lives. As co-directors, we knew we wanted to explore our shared passions as a duo and create a process that centers physical exploration. In a world where the freedom of the queer body is highly politicized, the idea of creating a safe space to explore our embodied narratives compelled us. 

Not only did directing a queer play feel right for us, but it also felt right for our campus—a small liberal arts school with a prominent queer community. We hoped to speak to our collective experience. In searching for the right play, we considered everything from brand new works to classics. There was one piece that excited both of us from the start, The Baltimore Waltz by Paula Vogel. This piece from 1992 explores grief and joy in the time of the AIDS crisis. At first, the play seemed like a daunting choice. As young adults, were we equipped to handle this deeply historical piece? Would a contemporary play speak to our community more directly? Despite our concerns, we took on the project and discovered that the play’s historical nature is exactly what impacted our community. 

The Baltimore Waltz unfolds in a hospital in Baltimore, Maryland as Anna imagines a fantastical trip across Europe with her brother Carl. They encounter a cast of outlandish characters all played by the mysterious Third Man. Gradually, the boundaries of the fantasy crack until the reality that they are in a hospital is unavoidable and Anna is forced to confront the reality that Carl is dying from AIDS. The character Carl was named after Vogel’s brother who had invited her to travel with him in Europe. Not knowing that he was HIV-positive, she turned him down. He later passed away due to complications related to AIDS. The fact that the play is about a lost opportunity struck us. Those lost to the crisis would be considered our elders if they were alive today. We thought performing this play could be a way to connect with them.

One of the most meaningful aspects of the project was exploring AIDS history throughout the rehearsal process. A particular theme that struck our company is how radical love and acceptance can be a form of resistance. Anna and Carl are physically affectionate throughout much of the play, even sleeping in the same bed. This is based on Paula Vogel’s experience of caring for her brother despite the perceived danger of contact with AIDS patients. As actor Josiah Kemp attested, “Community is central to queerness, especially when it becomes difficult or risky to maintain that community.” We were taken with the idea of intimacy as a scarce resource for those affected by AIDS at this time. 

In post-performance conversations, audience members spoke to their experience seeing the play. “I’ve really only gotten my queer history from film and books,” commented one student. “Seeing The Baltimore Waltz on stage at my university felt like the closest thing to getting that history from an elder in the community.” These discussions illuminated how important it is for young queer people to witness our history on stage. An individual tends to learn about their heritage first through family stories, but we are most often left to understand queer identity and lineage without the guidance of older figures. The aftermath of the AIDS crisis has harmed our society in incalculable ways. Perhaps one of the most tragic impacts for young people today is a lack of elders who could otherwise share generational knowledge and stories. Our formative exposure to queerness is usually a solo journey that takes place over a screen and is informed by younger voices. For many audience and company members, this was our first time seeing queer history embodied. 

One week before opening, Paula Vogel was generous enough to meet us over Zoom. One team member, hoping to understand how Vogel feels the playwright’s vision informs a director’s process, asked in a star-struck stammer, “So, what do you think directors should do with your stage directions?” 

“Read them.” She answered instantly with a firm casualness. She explained that she does not see them as stage directions, but as plasticity, a way of grappling with the two dimensions of a page. A playwright writes plasticity to share what’s in their head. It doesn’t mean that the play automatically captures the vision of the director, actor, or designer. “It means I may never get the opportunity to sit down and have coffee with you. I may be dead by the time you direct this show. But I just want to have a kind of cosmic cup of coffee with you.” 

She was referring to the cosmic space between a playwright and director’s vision, yet it also felt like she was speaking to the space between queer people today and voices of the past. While of course Paula Vogel is a living playwright, Carl and others who lost their lives during the AIDS crisis are not here to tell their story today. This is why we were initially daunted by the responsibility of sharing Carl’s story and getting it right. However, our conversation with the playwright suggested that there is no “right.” No matter how much we studied, we would never truly know what it was like to be Carl. The same is true for the majority of queer history, which has been obscured, unrecorded, and censored. There is so much we do not know. Just as directors, actors, and designers must listen to what a play is saying and respond with their own interpretation, we do the same for history. We listen for the stories available and respond with our own understanding. We didn’t know what it was like to be a queer person in 1992 during the AIDS crisis, but we did know what it is like to be a queer person in 2026. We could apply our lived experience to how we understood the characters. Paula Vogel’s metaphor describes it best: It was like a cosmic cup of coffee with the spirits of elders we never got to meet. 

We refer to The Baltimore Waltz as historical because it documents what feels like a distant past given how our rapidly shifting understandings of queerness. It is essential to remember that the play narrates events that only happened about thirty-five years ago and speaks truth to the present as well. A major political detail in the play is the imagery of the pink triangle. In Nazi Germany, the downward-facing pink triangle was a badge used to label gay people in concentration camps. In the eighties and nineties, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) used the upward-facing pink as a symbol of reclamation and to draw attention to the government’s genocidal negligence of the epidemic. In the play, after Carl is fired from his job as a librarian, he retaliates by teaching a group of children to make triangles with pink paper. This brings to mind a recent story of a librarian being fired for refusing to move more than 190 children’s books that allegedly “promoted gender confusion.” There are many other stories like this in the United States right now. Literature about queerness is being pulled from library and school shelves, school plays are being shut down, and experts are warning we are in the early stages of a genocide against trans Americans. What is happening in the US indeed resembles other times when queer lives have been targeted by the state. 

Queer performance that documents the past cannot simply be a study of history. When we see it as an open conversation, we allow ourselves to recognize how our realities resemble oppression we have faced in the past and how we can continue to resist. In our case, the act of physically immersing ourselves in part of our history by staging in theatrically had a transcendent effect. On opening night when the stage lights rose, our small black box was full of close friends and community members. It was then that we encountered the tension between the past and present which we were initially intimidated by. We were seeing a story that is considered historical, but the performance unfolded actively in the present moment. We were learning about elders but embodied by our peers. Society may have us believe the generational knowledge of our queer elders is merely history. But for three nights in our black box theater, the past and present shared a room.