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ACTS OF INTERVENTION: PERFORMANCE, GAY CULTURE, AND AIDS. David Román. Unnatural Acts: Theorizing the Performative Series. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998; pp. xxxiii + 344. $39.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.
In the closing moments of his extraordinary Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS, David Román calls his reader to hope, marking the capacity of "AIDS theatre and performance [to] create new ways of imagining community in the face of crisis" (284). If Román locates theatre and performance as vital resources in on-going negotiations over the meaning and politics of AIDS, national identity, and gay cultural formations, he never leaves behind social or historical context. Throughout Acts of Intervention, then, the hope Román holds out is located defiantly in history, the imagined future anchored but not determined by the past. His richly textured accounts range from AIDS fundraisers and vigils in the early 1980s to the street theatre of ACT-UP later in the same decade; from such unheralded early AIDS plays as One to the critically acclaimed and commercially successful As Js and The Normal Heart in 1985; from solo performances of gay white men like Ron Vawter and Tim Miller to the interventions of the ensemble Porno Afro Homos and of communitybased projects, such as Teatro Viva! in Los Angeles.
The heterogeneity of Roman's archive is all to his point. Throughout Acts of Intervention, he argues, persuasively, for expanded understandings of both theatre and AIDS. The particular performances he discusses are "acts of intervention," which seek to unmask "the ideological underpinnings of the systems that construct AIDS"...