A play hitting the stage in Toronto explores what life is currently like for someone living with HIV.
Toronto playwright and actor Mark Keller says that he was inspired to write his award-winning play POZ after he was diagnosed with HIV ten years ago.
Determined to do anything other than sit with his pain, Keller had the idea for POZ, a 70-minute stage play that dives into a personal story about his life with HIV. But it took ten years for POZ to come to fruition, with Keller saying he needed to experience life with HIV before he was able to create a play about it.
The production premiered at Toronto’s 2024 Fringe Festival after Keller entered a competition allowing the winner to perform at the popular event. He won the contest, wrote the play in a matter of weeks, and POZ went on to have a sold-out run. The play picked up several recognitions, including Best New Play from the Toronto Fringe Festival, the Patron’s Pick award, and Critic’s Pick by the Toronto Star.
A GAP IN MEDIA ABOUT HIV
After the first reported case of HIV in 1981, a lot of media was produced about the HIV/AIDS epidemic through the 80s and 90s. While some media perpetuated biases and stereotypes, many of them racist and homophobic, others gave a more truthful insight into the impacts of HIV.
But now, with medical advances, educational campaigns, and more awareness, life is different for many people with HIV than it was in the height of the epidemic, leaving a lot of that media outdated.
“I found there was this gap in media around HIV. I found I was seeing a lot of what HIV was like in the 80s and 90s, when the epidemic just absolutely decimated the queer community,” Keller told Queer & Now.
“But then there just wasn’t anything about what it is like now. To just exist with HIV, where death isn’t what defines our era, but stigma.”
Supported by friends and fellow actors Alan Shonfield and Amber Pilon, POZ sees Keller take audiences on a ten-year journey, exploring things like stigma, personal relationships, medical advances and personal perseverance through the eyes of someone with HIV.
“What the show is about is [that] it’s gotten a lot better, even from my first diagnosis ten years ago,” Keller explained, adding that he feels a lot of people, especially heterosexual people, don’t realize this. He gives the example of U = U.
“It’s really surprising how many people don’t know about U=U. I think queer people are much more educated, but I’ll meet a straight person and I talk about undetectable status, and they’ve never heard of it,” he explained.
The Canadian Government explains that U = U, or undetectable = untransmittable, refers to scientific evidence that HIV cannot be passed on through sex when someone living with the virus is on treatment, and the amount of the virus in their blood remains very low.
“A lot of people don’t know that because they just see the media from the 80s and 90s, and they still think that, you know, HIV/AIDS is a death sentence, when that couldn’t be further from the truth.”
And queer people are not perfect. Keller explained that there is still a lot of stigma surrounding HIV within 2SLGBTQ+ communities.
“There’s a little note in the program for the show about how I started collecting all the rejections that I was getting online when I disclosed my status, and I ended up with over 70 screenshots,” he laughed. “But even that has gone a lot better. Queer people have gotten more educated.”
“Just last week, I got rejected online. So, it’s still around, but it’s gotten better.”
A MESSAGE OF HOPE
The show also includes an adventure that sees Keller riding his bicycle from Toronto to Montreal, raising money for the People with AIDS Foundation, in the first year after his diagnosis.
“There’s one line in the show that I kind of say over and over again. I say, ‘This is just what you do now.’ It’s kind of the mantra of the show. It’s the mantra that I had in my head when I first did the bike ride from Toronto to Montreal. This is just what you do now.”
But it goes beyond taking a long ride for charity, and takes on a new meaning as a mantra of hope – something that Keller hopes everyone in the audience takes home with them.
“It’s also this mantra of getting through the shit and also getting through the joy. ‘This is what you do now,’ can be about accepting joy, but it can also be gritting down and bearing it until you come out the other side.”
“Personal resilience can get you through really, really tough times. And I want people to leave inspired, and I want people to leave educated, maybe they learned something a bit more about HIV.”
POZ runs from April 22-27 at Toronto’s Native Earth’s Aki Studio. Tickets are available here.
