Download Plays, Playwrights and Infectious Diseases

Plays, Playwrights and Infectious Diseases
Grace Patton
The theater is an age old ritual that can depict life, make a mockery of it, or simply blow
things out of proportion. As long as there has been theater there has also been disease. Diseases
have been topics for plays have affected what playwrights write and have even closed theater
doors when diseases have hit. AIDs have been a major part of theater in the past thirty years.
The huge success of RENT has brought peoples attention to causes of AIDs as well as the
fascinating stories behind the disease victims. Angels in America was a controversial play that
came out in the 1980’s and brought AIDs and gays to the forefront of the American mind.
Infectious diseases also had affects on early playwrights and the early theater. The Ancient
Greeks believed that Pandora opened a box and let out suffering and disease. Greek tragedies
deal mostly with suffering and not disease. Shakespeare was greatly affected by the plague; it
killed many of his family members, including his son. It also caused the theater to close upon
many occasions. Theater has been used for centuries to portray messages that the average citizen
can understand and may not have comprehended before.