Grief, community and memory: Log Boy is a wickedly intelligent post-AIDS play

Jonathan van der Knaap/STCSA Anthony (Anthony Nicola) is an anxious, grief-stricken mess mourning the loss of his partner, Michael, who died from AIDS.

Over the weekend of his partner’s funeral, Anthony must play host to Michael’s closest and cattiest friends, Justin (Paul Capsis) and Jamie (Paul Reichstein).

All the while, Anthony is cruised by a spectral Leather Daddy (Chris Asimos) determined to keep him bound to his grief.

I would almost dare to call Anthony Nocera’s Log Boy a gesture towards a post-AIDS play.

But this production, directed by Riley Spadaro, knows just as well as many of us do that, despite enormous medical progress, there remains no cure for HIV/AIDS .

Instead, Log Boy is about grief, community and memory.

Nocera uses the personal to interrogate questions of the political.

We’re asked to consider to whom queer history belongs, and how we can possibly move on from a crisis that is, indeed, still ongoing.

The ‘AIDS play’ The significance of works like Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1991), Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985) and Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance (2018) is undeniable.

In particular, the works of Kramer and Kushner were vital to the humanisation of the queer community in the middle of the crisis years.

But I must confess a frustration with theatre’s fixation on the crisis and the image of the dying queer body.

The “ AIDS play ” often centres on an insufferable queen and his conventionally attractive boyfriend.

After falling in love, the pretty boy slowly dies across the second half of the work.

Given Kushner and Kramer’s prominence, the image of the heartbroken widow crying over his dead partner’s corpse has become endemic to gay men’s theatre.