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

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ)

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. This was once necessary in provoking empathy in heterosexual audiences, but now it often feels grotesque.

The HIV/AIDS crisis was not the only hardship faced by the queer community over the course of the 20th century. It is, indeed, defining and often an undercurrent of other struggles; however, stories of systemic police violence, the impacts of the second world war and the Lavender Scare all go largely untold due to this focus.

Log Boy is not primarily about AIDS and it does not stage the dying queer body. These facts are of great benefit to the work.

The small heartaches of grief

Nicola delivers a wonderfully awkward portrait of the mid-to-late 20s over-intellectualising gay man that descends, as his character does, into a riveting study of the small heartaches that make up grief.

Capsis is diabolical as the fastidious and facetious Justin. Justin learns details of the funeral’s guest list and throws an absolute fit, plunging the weekend into chaos. Capsis might play a nelly bottom, but he makes this production his bitch.

Reichstein enters to lightning and smoke reminiscent of Death Becomes Her (1992) and acts up an absolute storm as the secretive and seething Jamie. Jamie knows things Anthony does not – and he is not afraid to let Anthony know it.

Elena Carapetis is a breath of fresh comedic air as Anthony’s mother. Mum is gloriously written and Carapetis makes the absolute most of every heart-warming, knee-slapping second that she spends on stage.

Asimos delivers as the sexiest spectre of grief I have ever seen put to stage, and the audience are all enthusiastically consenting recipients. However, I do feel Leather Daddy is somewhat under-utilised, and not just because he is sexy.

Leather Daddy is not much more than an inconvenience to Anthony. If he were more of a horrific undead obstacle to Anthony’s healing, it would increase the sense of danger the work seeks to curate.

Wickedly intelligent

Perhaps the greatest horror Log Boy stages is the self-involvement of young neoliberal gay men. We see this come to a fever-pitch at the work’s emotional climax, which begins with the bickering of Anthony and Justin.

Nocera’s visceral, haunting script shows us just how differently these two generations of gay men view just about everything. Anthony rightly criticises Justin’s sex-negative language. Justin won’t have a bar of it, rightly naming the mindset Anthony criticises a survival strategy from the time before PrEP.

The beauty of these collisions between their mindsets means that across Log Boy the three men are all simultaneously right. But they are all also simultaneously wrong – about HIV/AIDS, about the titular Log Boy, about Michael.

Our youth-obsessed culture tosses aside old queens like Justin and Jamie, and Log Boy advocates valiantly against this norm. I couldn’t help but wonder while watching: how many gay men under 25 know George Michael by name alone? How many of them know he was outed on a beat like those Log Boy memorialises?

Log Boy is a wickedly intelligent examination of the legacies of the HIV/AIDS crisis and the dissonances inherent to the fact the disease still touches and ends the lives of many across the world.

Log Boy from Smiling Bear and State Theatre Company of South Australia is at AC Arts, Adelaide, until October 10.

Triss Niemi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/09/grief-community-and-memory-log-boy-is-a-wickedly-intelligent-post-aids-play/