American Players Theatre's 'Casey and Diana' deftly looks back to the AIDS crisis

Katie Reiser, Isthmus

Playwright Nick Green’s Casey and Diana premiered at the 2023 Stratford Festival of Canada and is now making its regional premiere at American Players Theatre’s intimate Touchstone Theatre.

The play imagines the week leading up to the 1991 visit of Princess Diana to Casey House, a hospice in Toronto dedicated to the care of men with HIV/AIDS in their final days. Today, an HIV diagnosis no longer carries the death sentence it once did (though access to lifesaving treatment remains deeply unequal, especially following cuts to USAID-supported programs).

It's easy to forget the speed and devastation of the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Amid fear, stigma, and rampant misinformation, Princess Diana helped transform public perception simply by embracing people living with AIDS without gloves or hesitation.

Death is the one inevitability we all share, but hospice care seeks to make that final passage as compassionate and dignified as possible. Casey House stood at the forefront of that philosophy for men dying of AIDS, providing not only medical care but also the humanity many had been denied elsewhere.

Joe Cerqua’s sound design sets the tone before the play begins, with early '90s classics like Prince’s "Cream" and "Disappear" from INXS playing through the theater’s PA system as the audience members take their seats. A miniature model of the actual Casey House glows from within like a magical shrine. Scott Penner's smart set centers on a sparse double room at Casey House — two hospital beds, trunks, nightstands, and the accumulated artifacts of interrupted lives. The surrounding hallways and nurses' station emerge through use by the actors, creating a sense of an entire community existing just beyond the room's walls.

Thomas (La Shawn Banks) has spent the last five months at Casey House, making him the longest hospice resident, enduring the exits and entrances of too many roommates. His newest roommate is Andre (a nuanced and honest Joe Meyer) a young man brought to Casey House via ambulance, and who, like Thomas, is estranged from his family. When Vera (Elizabeth Ledo) the competent, no-nonsense nurse, announces that Princess Diana will be making a visit, she is careful to say that the royal arrival will be in seven days instead of a week, since the span of a full week seems too daunting for men struggling to make it through another day. Ledo is both assured and commanding in the role.

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