""Some of the plays we've staged were in real danger of vanishing entirely," says Curtis, a writer and director based in London. "The people who saw them when they were written are getting older now, and so are the friends and family of the playwrights. So it just felt very vital to do something about it. This is a real grassroots effort to restage these great plays and celebrate the people who wrote them.""
"The project's third season concludes this week with a rehearsed reading of The Rights, George Whitmore's provocative 1980 comedy about straightwashing. Set on the queer idyll of Fire Island , it follows a former couple at loggerheads over their semi-forgotten Broadway musical, which they wrote many years earlier about their own romance. Paul needs his ex, Larry, to sign over the rights so it can be turned into a glitzy TV series, but there's a serious sticking point: the network wants to make the characters straight."
The AIDS Plays Project, founded in 2023, stages neglected queer plays by writers who died from HIV/AIDS-related illnesses, aiming to preserve and revive marginalised work. The project restages plays that have fallen into obscurity, sometimes reconstructing scripts where no definitive archive version exists. Restorations create dialogue between contemporary LGBTQ+ communities and earlier generations affected by the epidemic. The effort operates as grassroots preservation and cultural rediscovery, honoring playwrights whose works were sidelined by premature deaths. The third season includes a rehearsed reading of George Whitmore's The Rights, a 1980 comedy about straightwashing that explores commodification and censorship of queer culture.
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