Imagining AIDS

Today I asked one of the students in my class to direct a play about HIV. I didn't give him any guidelines, but I told him I'd like the play to be entertaining, and educational; two Lifetime Entertainment words I never thought I'd hear come out of my mouth in the same sentence. 

The play moved quickly. In the first scene, the girl  found out about her virus, and by the second scene she was already lying in a hospital bed. 

This seemed unrealistic to me; most studies have shown you can live a seemingly healthy life for many years before you show any signs that might require hospitalization. 

I asked the class when the girl was infected, and they said they hadn't thought about that yet. "But she's sick now?" I verified. "Yes," the student director responded. 

"You know that she wouldn't be in a hospital if she was just diagnosed, unless she's had the virus for many years before her diagnosis?" 

The student director responded blankly. I'm not sure he'd thought about how long the character had the disease, or how sick she was, to him, HIV meant sickness, visible sickness characterized by a stay in a hospital.

At other points in the play, it seemed as if the students were acting out scenes they'd never actually seen. When one of the students acted out a doctor in an AIDS clinic, it seemed clear that the actor had never seen someone drawing blood. He attempted to pantomime the process, but he stuck a pen next to the boys finger, instead of the veins in the fold of the boy's arm.

In another instance, two of the girls in the group teased the HIV positive girl. They came to her hospital bed, specifically to hurl insults at her. This seemed especially cruel, and I felt like, as an audience member, I didn't believe the character's motivations.

"Why is your character here?" I asked one of the actors. "Because we want to hurt the girl's self-esteem," she responded. "Why?" "Because we are rude girls."

While there is still a huge stigma attached to HIV in the states, I couldn't imagine classmates visiting a child with HIV just to tease him or her. Was I naive to the HIV stigma in South Africa, or was this scene an over-dramatized or imagined relationship? 

After a while, I began to realize that the play that was emerging was illuminating not the truth of what it meant to be HIV positive in South Africa, but an imagination of what would happen if someone in the class disclosed his or her status as HIV positive.

I thought about correcting the students, and telling them I didn't believe this is how the community would react to someone revealing their status, but then I realized that to intervene would be to create a play even farther removed from any South African truth.

If the point of a play is to reveal some sort of truth to the audience, did it matter which truth was exposed; the truth of the stigma or the true perception of the stigma? 

It was the imagined over-reaction to status disclosure that the students were dramatizing, and even though it did not correspond with any AIDS narrative I'd ever seen (even the movies I'd seen of family members disowning children with HIV were not as cruel as my student's taunts), the play pointed out all the barriers stacked against someone who wants to disclose their status.

In an atmosphere of taunting, of disrespect, and fear, it would take someone with mega amounts of courage to ever disclose they were HIV positive.