The title of Donja R. Love’s one in two refers to a statistic: the one in two gay black men expected nowadays, as per at least one study, to become HIV-positive. The startling finding has prompted Love to shape this urgent cry for help, even as he reports in a program sidebar that he is HIV-positive and has been for over 10 years.
He imagines a large white waiting room with a three-sided, two-tier sitting area (set designer Arnulfo Maldonado accommodates him) in which three men—identified as Person on the Left (Edward Mawere), Person in the Middle (Leland Fowler), and Person on the Right (Jamyl Dobson)—have been indefinitely assigned. They’re there to enact repeatedly the HIV-positive plight of the typical “one in two.”
After explaining the premise, they each don a jersey identifying themselves as #1, #2 or #3, whereupon the audience chooses by applause the room occupant designated to portray the autoimmune one-in-two. (Apparently, the designations change from performance to performance, meaning Mawere, Fowler and Dobson have learned all three parts and are prepared to adjust themselves on the spur of the moment.)
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★ review here.]
With enthusiasm they begin their task by playing children but quickly age into #1’s health crisis—with #2 and #3 taking on various roles of people in #1’s life. For instance among other figures, they all, at one time or another, are #1’s mother as well in other scenes a sex partner. As the trio go about reiterating the conditions, #1 begins balking at having to act out yet again the man’s inevitable demise. The pain has become unbearable for him. Moreover, his despair undoes #2 as well, who reveals that he’s positive and terrified of the future.
Playwright Love is indisputably on a mission, and who would blame him for his tough-minded theatrical crusade? That’s even as he allows himself to be more than slightly polemical. To underline his determined point further, he calls for a tally to be shown on a three-part high back wall screen. There, video designer Alex Basco Koch projects mounting numbers. (I kept a close, possibly distracted watch on the numbers, wondering whether they’d reach one million, two million, et cetera.)
An intriguing one in two aspect is its appearance only a week or two after Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance. When the unexpected, shocking plague struck in the 1980s, AIDS-related plays inevitably followed into the 1990s, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America perhaps the most famous and most successful.
Now it looks as if we’re getting a second-generation examination of the blight. Although AIDS is now more often than not chronic rather than fatal, the complete cure is not yet in sight. In addition to that, since younger men tend to be less aware of the dangers (being born after the earlier death-sentence days), some statistics show a rise of the afflicted. Surely, Love is concerned along those lines. He’s worried that numbers are going to rise exponentially.
Speaking of Angels in America, in which the only black character is an amusingly caustic nurse, Love positions one in two as a Kushner companion piece, if not a deliberate corrective. (The all lower-case title graphic is clearly meant to suggest Love’s attitude about the inferior regard prevalent towards HIV/AIDS in the black community.)
With Stevie Walker-Webb directing for results that cut to the bone, all three actors do their utmost to push their limits. Indeed, it may be that if Dobson, Fowler and Mawere are homosexual themselves—no reason for the program to indicate their sexual identities—they could be performing from their own experiences as well as those Love gives them in his fierce script.
By the way, Dobson, Mawere, and Fowler—who took on the #1 role at the performance I attended—represent (possibly not by calculated design) the three general body types—ectomorph (Dobson), endomorph (Mawere), mesomorph (Fowler). Admittedly, this may be entirely beside Love’s and casting director Judy Henderson’s purpose. Just a reviewer’s observation.
Interestingly, Love is writing about out-of-the-closet gay black men. They’re visible, maybe more so in the second decade of the 21st century. He is not commenting on black men living, as the vernacular has it, on the down low, or the DL. Many in that group, whether married or not, consider themselves straight.
Given Love’s particular perspective, he may feel he’d prefer to write only about what he knows as a result of living it. But this does raise the question whether the accumulating numbers on the frightening wall screen also include black men still remaining closeted.
No matter Love’s focus, he writes one in two as much as a protest as anything else. He positions it as a call for something to be done. He insists on it, not that there’s any current evidence for disagreeing with him. When the actors have finished the play, they don’t really finish. Love is so serious that he’s found a way to make the very act of exiting a matter to reckon with. No further explanation of that here, though. You’ll have to discover the unsettling news for yourself.
One in Two opened December 10, 2019, at Signature Center and runs through January 12, 2020. Tickets and information: thenewgroup.org
