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34th annual season comes to a close for Contemporary American Theater Festival

By Tabitha Johnston - Chronicle Staff | Aug 2, 2024

The Heir Agency CEO Duante Brown, left, and The Gatekeepers Collective Executive Director John-Martin Green, center, listen as Dante Jeanfelix talks about his experience with the Contemporary American Theater Festival this year in the Shipley Recital Hall on Saturday. Tabitha Johnston

SHEPHERDSTOWN — The Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF) completed its 34th season in Shepherdstown on Sunday.

According to CATF Director of Development Vicki Willman, the festival schedule was jam-packed from the beginning to the end of the month of July, ensuring all attendees, regardless of the time when they attend, would have a similarly high-quality experience.

“It always feels like the festival reopens every three days. We tend to have audiences come in waves of Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and Friday, Saturday and Sunday every week,” Willman said. “We’re constantly welcoming in a new group of people who are going to experience the work.”

With each wave of new audience members, the festival felt reinvigorated throughout its monthlong, annual season, according to Willman.

“It’s really fun to be in the lobbies before or after they see our performances, to get their thoughts about the work,” Willman said. “For them, even on the last week of the festival, our performances are still so powerful. That is what brings them back.”

A sign marks the location for the final CATF in Context of the festival's 2024 season on Saturday in the Frank Arts Center. Tabitha Johnston

Along with the festival’s four plays being held multiple times a week, every week throughout the festival, a number of other supplementary events were held. One of those, CATF in Context, focused on topics related to the season’s plays every Saturday morning in W.H. Shipley Recital Hall in the Frank Arts Center.

“We are about talking theater, about thinking theater, about feeling theater and, I would like to say, about believing theater has the power to change,” said CATF Associate Artistic Director Theresa Davis, who moderated the final CATF in Context of the year on Saturday.

The theme of the event, “AIDS & Activism: Creating Art and Building Awareness,” was selected to help audience members attending the two-part performance of “What Will Happen to All That Beauty?” understand some of its subject matter better.

With the theatric offering’s plot centering around how an intergenerational black family weathers the AIDS crisis from its inception in the 1980s to modern times, CATF selected three experts to talk about the offering, as well as the history and current situation with HIV/AIDS in the United States.

“Today, there are six classes of HIV medications. We have come very far with HIV treatment. We now even have injectable drugs that people with HIV can actually take,” said The Heir Agency CEO, who presented on behalf of the Black AIDS Institute, Duante Brown. “HIV, at this point, is a chronic disease like cancer and so many others.”

CATF Associate Artistic Director Theresa Davis, right, moderates a discussion between The Heir Agency CEO Duante Brown, left, The Gatekeepers Collective Executive Director John-Martin Green, center left, and actor Dante Jeanfelix in the Shipley Recital Hall on Saturday. Tabitha Johnston

Brown, along with the play’s HIV advocate consultant, John-Martin Green, and actor Dante Jeanfelix, emphasized how hopeful the current situation is for those with HIV. With a healthy lifestyle and correct medication, many people with the disease can avoid it ever developing into AIDS.

Those who are given an AIDS diagnosis are not necessarily facing a death sentence, as they would have in the past, as proper treatment can lead to them developing enough white blood cells to bring them back to only being HIV positive. Some people with HIV can develop enough white blood cells for testing to no longer pick up on HIV cells in their body, ensuring they are unable to transmit the disease to anyone else even without taking any cautionary steps like using protection or taking additional medications.

Brown noted that multiple forms of emergency medication are now available to help those who are physically involved with someone with HIV/AIDS avoid contracting the disease.

“Seeing the person as a person still, and not as just the disease they have acquired, is essential,” Brown said. “Stigma drives HIV. We would probably have already eradicated HIV, if there was no stigma against it.”

For Green, being involved with the development of “What Will Happen to All That Beauty?” has enabled him to use theater to fight, over the past month, against the stigma that he, as an HIV-positive person, has experienced.

“For me, art is healing,” Green, who is also the founder and executive director of The Gatekeepers Collective, said. “It is a healing modality.”

To purchase a discounted season pass to next summer’s festival, visit https://catf.org/2025-think-ahead-passes.