Event

As Is by William M. Hoffman

AS IS by William M. Hoffman
Directed by Shawn B O'Neal

Rick Grant-Coons
Thomas Dean
BJ Nash
Jason Kaye
Andrew Gibout
Jon M. Ruiz
Lee Williams
Veronica Jarboe
Katie Hulse
Jason Wisniewski

Taking place in the mid 1980s, As Is sketches the lives of Rich and Saul, a New York couple who have recently broken up. Rich, a writer who has just published a collection of short stories, has gone off to live with a new lover named Chet. Saul, a photographer, is still living at the old apartment and still in love with Rich. As Is explores the effect that AIDS, a relatively new epidemic in the 1980s, has on a group of friends living in NYC.

Playwright, librettist, and educator William M. Hoffman is best known for his ground-breaking, critically acclaimed play As Is, one of the first theatrical works to focus on the AIDS epidemic.
The play opened in a New York off-Broadway production in March 1985 (followed a month later by Larry
Kramer's The Normal Heart, another enraged chronicle of the early years of the AIDS epidemic), and due toits critical and commercial success was transferred to an award-winning Broadway production two monthslater.