Review: A Stunning WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO ALL THAT BEAUTY? at Contemporary American Theater Festival

Donja R. Love’s What Will Happen to All That Beauty?, now premiering at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, WV, will inevitably draw comparisons to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance. All three are sweeping two-play multigenerational accounts of the impact of AIDS on the American gay community. Beauty, however, differs in one crucial respect; it seeks to fill a gap in the two older works, mentioned by many: the drastic under-inclusion in those other works of the Black experience. Love is explicit about this, in his own words setting out “to offer representation to Black people with HIV and to those Black people who have died due to AIDS-related complications.” It’s not that women or people of color went totally unrepresented in either earlier play, but the primary focus was on White men. This work, by contrast, is almost exclusively about HIV+ men and women of color. Moreover, there are more representatives of groups mentioned in the common “LGBTQ” acronym under initials other than G.

Beauty is also less restrained than its predecessors. You might ask how anything could be less restrained than the eponymous screaming Angel of Angels in America, but going supernatural doesn’t really count. If we’re talking in merely human terms, lack of restraint can manifest itself as melodrama, and it does here: unusual secrets, coincidences, contrived revelations, mementos and artifacts brought to light at an auspicious moment. And at times in this show that tendency can be a little over the top. But I hope that does not put audience-members off; this work is important, and deserves the kind of exposure its predecessors received.

The play is full of events, and full of characters, and it may be hard to discuss them without trudging through some plot, thereby spoiling revelations a little along the way. I’ll try to navigate my best course around spoilers, but I (along with most of  the audience, I’m sure) really do want to discuss this play.

The first thing to note is that the word “beauty” in the title is seriously meant. The play begins and ends with church sermons about beauty. The term is never explicitly defined, but I took the term as used here to include the beauty of Black bodies, of sexuality of all stripes, and of the community of Black and gay men, extending as well to those who love them and care for them. This is not, I should add, the meaning attached to the word in the first sermon, preached in 1986 by the Rev. Emmanuel Bridges Sr. (Jerome Preston Bates), an old-school Black preacher with old-school notions of what is and is not acceptable to God. He attaches the concepts of “beauty” and “sacrifice” to each other, suggesting that one must sometimes sacrifice one’s sexuality in order to achieve beauty in one’s life.

We then shift to the marital bed of the preacher’s son J.R. (Jude Tibeau), which he shares with his wife Maxine (Toni L. Martin), who is five months pregnant with their son.  (See the production photo posted with this review.) There is unfortunately another newcomer in the bed with them: AIDS, from which it soon emerges that J.R. suffers, as Max has suspected. We soon learn that the love of J.R. and Max is both carnal and genuine, but that each of them is also bisexual, and that each has a license from the other to follow same-sex inclinations elsewhere. Knowing J.R. has acted on that license, Max insists he gets tested, leading to them both learning he’s positive. And in 1986, the available formulary of AIDS medications was still practically useless. J.R. is now under what amounts to a death sentence.

As we soon are shown, however, dying of AIDS is not like an execution, but constitutes a process and a journey, involving not only the husband and the wife, but a whole community of fellow-sufferers, physicians, and family. J.R. is initiated into the community of fellow-sufferers by Abdul (Danté Jeanfelix), an activist gathering Black men with AIDS together for mutual support. Abdul is the first, but far from the last, of the caretakers we will encounter in this play, most of whom are acting without formal credentials, but who are nonetheless absolutely necessary to the creation of the beauty on display in this play.

We soon learn as well that Abdul’s group exemplifies the continuity of caretaking which is a central theme of the play. Abdul may be running it now, but he has taken over that function from a founder, a Reverend (“May he rest”). And eventually we shall see Abdul perish as well, passing the caretaking on. But in the meantime, he cooks a mean chicken, delighting all who taste of it. More care and more beauty.

At Abdul’s group, an older gentleman, Troy (Keith Lee Grant) is video-recording everything with a then-state-of-the-art VHS recorder. When I speak of the play’s lack of restraint, this is an early example, a kind of Chekhov’s pistol unsubtly displayed in Act One; we know it will be “fired” later. But it takes a curious path to that end; this is the last we shall see of Troy, who in his passing bequeaths it to J.R. to start it on its talismanic journey to where it turns up at the end of the play, a very definite, even if somewhat predictable, repetition of the continuity of care theme, but also of the importance of there being a record. Abdul shares Troy’s conviction that there should be a record of everything, though Abdul’s medium is a notebook.

At the meeting, we also encounter Grace (M J Rawls), a trans woman prostitute disgusted with the lack of support she feels from Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a largely White and male group that figures in Larry Kramer’s equally iconic AIDS-related play The Normal Heart. Grace’s raucous denunciation of GMHC locates us in the midst of the politics of the situation in the New York of that era. Grace incidentally reveals herself to be not actually an AIDS sufferer, but one of the caretakers, running a house where many residents are AIDS victims.

And so J.R.’s ordeal proceeds, with him taking meds every four hours, meds which have unpleasant side effects but, it seems, no offsetting curative power despite all the hopes J.R. invests in them. We see Abdul reaching his end, shortly after he conveys the VHS recorder to J.R. (and has sex with him). And finally, inevitably, we see J.R. using the recorder to communicate with his son, shortly before J.R. also dies.

And after all this, we are still not at the end of Part 1. We must watch Max bringing her now-fatherless child home, after her employer has sacked her out of fear of AIDS (recall that in this exact era, Princess Diana made headlines by engaging in casual contact with AIDS victims). The consequence is that Max is bereft of both health insurance and income. At her wits’ and resources’ end, she appeals to the Reverend, J.R.’s father who had disowned him, for help. The help the Reverend offers, however, is to take over the child’s raising. This proposal sets up the final crisis of Part 1. Eventually, Max understands she must concede.

I shall have less to say here about Part 2, which picks up the story in 2016, in Jackson, Mississippi, where the Reverend lives, as does J.R.’s son Manny – though Manny (also played by Jude Tibeau), now 28 and gay, has parted ways with the Reverend, just as his father did and for the same kinds of reasons.

Having been told this much, the reader can have a good notion of the continuing breadth of the play, of its unsparing approach on the one hand, and of its humanity on the other. I will add that Part 2 is as full of surprises as Part 1. But the same themes (communities of care, creation of a record, and beauty, in the sense Playwright Love uses the word) get played upon, though in new ways. All of the cast members from Part 1 are back, some in new, and sometimes quite different, supporting roles. (The cast, to a man and woman, is magnificent, and likely caused everyone else in the audience, like me, to fall in love with their characters.)

In the end, as I’ve said, it comes down to a sermon about beauty. Who preaches it and under what circumstances need not be revealed here, but the text can be mentioned. It returns to questions of what beauty is, and what it means for Black, gay men in particular. The speaker says: “I never think I’m worthy enough of holdin’ anything beautiful. The world constantly tells me I’m not.” And the world too often seems to succeed in persuading people that they do not deserve and cannot hold beauty. The speaker, however, while refusing to believe that beauty is beyond his deserving, does come to a different take on letting beauty go, on sacrificing it. Like energy, there is no destroying it or triumphing over it, but it can be moved around, for instance by a sacrifice that passes it to others. In fact, the script seems to suggest, that is the best way to preserve it.

Of the plays in this season at Shepherdstown, this one received a staging on the biggest stage (the Frank Center), this one received the loudest cheers at curtain call, and this one clearly won viewers’ hearts the most. As the audience-member in the seat next to me said, “You could just feel the love in this play.”

What Will Happen to All That Beauty?, Part 1 and What Will Happen to All That Beauty?, Part 2, by Donja R. Love, directed by Malika Oyetimein, associate director Lamar Perry, produced by the Contemporary American Theater Festival, at the Frank Center, 260 University Drive, Shepherdstown, WV, through July 28. Tickets $70, $60 for seniors, for each performance, available at https://catf.org/2024-play-what-will-happen-to-all-that-beauty-by-donja-r-love/#beauty1 and https://catf.org/2024-play-what-will-happen-to-all-that-beauty-by-donja-r-love/#beauty2. Strong language, nudity, simulated sex; recommended for ages 18+.

Photo credit: Seth Freeman.

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