On December 1, instead of taking their daily dose of the HIV medication Dovato, the playwright Victor I. Cazares filmed an Instagram video of the pill’s funeral. They burned the small white tablet on a miniature pyre inside a geode their grandparents had brought from El Apache, a mountain in Chihuahua, Mexico, across the border from their hometown of El Paso, Texas. They gave their second pill a burial with a flower on top in their parents’ backyard. The third received a drop of Cazares’s own blood while LucÃa Méndez’s “Amor de Nadie,†the theme song of their favorite telenovela growing up, played as the soundtrack. They’re planning to do a final video in which their last four pills get kidnapped by Pilgrim Barbie and turned to dust.
It has been almost three months since Cazares last took their meds, a strike they say will continue until the New York Theatre Workshop — the downtown Off Broadway institution they once considered their artistic home — calls for a cease-fire in Gaza. They decided to stop while waiting to fly to El Paso to see family after receiving the news that their grandmother was critically ill. They had almost left the pills behind while packing: How could I have forgotten those? they thought. They began taking Atripla over a decade ago when they received a positive HIV diagnosis as a graduate student at Brown University and then formed a “religious, mystical†attachment to their medication — a miraculous thing that transformed a death sentence into a manageable condition. Lately, the siege in Gaza was all Cazares could think about, and the theater world’s silence had been weighing on them. At that moment, they thought about the queer radicals who had screamed and staged die-ins to get those drugs to begin with. If they were going to stage their own protest, it felt right to root it in a history that had allowed for their existence. “I am using the particular history of HIV and the New York Theatre Workshop,†they say, referencing Rent, a pivotal production in the Workshop’s history. “HIV has always been a part of my presence. So it became inevitable it would then become a protest.â€
Cazares first arrived at NYTW as the Tow playwright in residence in January 2020 and immediately felt in step with the theater’s creative and political values. “I felt like part of the family,†Cazares says from their home in Portland, Oregon. “I found my place both as an artist and a theater professional.†In Cazares’s plays, two of which have been staged at the Workshop, mortality clings to the characters like dust. Their protagonists are on the run or looking for a way out. Annihilation perches on the edges: poverty, genocide, catatonia, addiction. Ghosts hang around. Cazares’s 2022 play, american (tele)visions, flits in and out of media (live camera, recorded video, video games) and states of fantasy, reality, and the afterlife; one actor plays both a dead brother and that dead brother’s lover. NYTW has a reputation for prioritizing artistic vision and has nurtured directors like Ivo van Hove, Sam Gold, and Rachel Chavkin, more recently premiering Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play and staging Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me. The nonprofit enjoys challenging its audiences, and none of its shows feels like another. (The current production, I Love You So Much I Could Die, alternates between monologues read by a text-to-speech computer program and acoustic-guitar songs performed by the playwright, Mona Pirnot.) “Victor’s work feels aligned with what they try to foster,†says Shana Gozansky, who directed Cazares’s Religiones Gringas at Brown, “productions that ask the audience to have an intimate experience with the work and not just observe.â€
This artistic limberness has gone hand in hand with the Workshop’s political identity. When Black Lives Matter activism resurged in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the theater opened its lobby as a way station so protesters could get water and use the bathrooms. It posted statements on social media supporting the protests, writing, “Only when all members of our community are truly safe — when their lives and humanity are valued above their artistic contributions — will we experience the community we aspire to be.†Afterward, it released occasional “accountability updates†with the goal of becoming “a fully anti-racist organization.†In 2017, NYTW launched Core Team, a working group in which members (including Cazares during their time there) discuss the Workshop’s values and how to translate them into specific policies. When someone at the Workshop committed a microaggression toward another person, Cazares recalls, it “launched a thousand restorative-justice meetings.†Surely, an institution that prints land acknowledgments in its programs would recognize the settler-colonial violence at play in Gaza, they thought. But when it came to calls for a cease-fire, Cazares encountered a stubborn silence. “It’s a cognitive dissonance,†they say.
Palestine has always had a fraught existence in the New York theater world. In 2016, the Public Theater canceled without comment the premiere of The Siege, a production by the Freedom Theatre, a Palestinian group based in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. A few years before that, the Metropolitan Opera had canceled a live broadcast of The Death of Klinghoffer, which narrativizes the terrorist hijacking of a passenger liner, owing to pushback led by the Anti-Defamation League. In 2006, NYTW was set to host the Stateside debut of My Name Is Rachel Corrie, a one-woman play about a 23-year-old from Olympia, Washington, who was killed by an Israel Defense Forces bulldozer while trying to stop the demolition of a Palestinian home in Rafah. After her death, the actor Alan Rickman and The Guardian editor Katharine Viner created a show based on her journals and emails. The play had an acclaimed run at London’s Royal Court Theatre, yet less than a month before it was set to premiere, NYTW “indefinitely postponed†its own production. At the time, James Nicola, the Workshop’s artistic director, told the New York Times he’d had discussions with Jewish leaders who were “very defensive†after the 2006 election in which Hamas won control of the Palestinian legislature. “It seemed as though if we proceeded, we would be taking a stand we didn’t want to take,†he said. During a panel about the Workshop’s history last year, he referred to the controversy as “the darkest moment†in his 34-year tenure. (Nicola declined to speak for this piece.)
Rickman decried the theater’s decision as “censorship born out of fear,†and Tony Kushner called the situation “ghastly.†A group of Jewish writers, including Harold Pinter and Stephen Fry, wrote a letter to the Times asking, “What is it that New York audiences must be protected from?†In the aftermath, the Workshop sought out Palestinian partners, including Najla Said, the daughter of the renowned Palestinian American academic Edward Said; she co-founded an Arab American theater collective called Nibras as a theater in residence at NYTW. (It has since dissolved.) The Workshop formed a partnership with the Freedom Theatre and visited the company in Jenin. It later hosted Freedom’s production of The Island, a South African play about apartheid, in its smaller black-box studio at 4th Street Theatre, which it also gave to Said for her one-woman show, Palestine. In 2012, NYTW produced Food and Fadwa, by Lameece Issaq and Jacob Kader, the second and most recent work by a Palestinian writer staged in its main theater. “My experience with them has been excellent,†says Said. “I know of plenty of other theaters, which I will not name, which refuse to even consider work on the subject that comes from us.â€
In its current relationship with the Freedom Theatre, the Workshop is threading a small needle. On December 13, the Israeli army ransacked and vandalized the theater, detaining the artistic director, Ahmed Tobasi, and imprisoning the theater’s general manager, Mustafa Sheta, and recent graduate Jamal Abu Joas. (Sheta has yet to be released.) The Workshop’s artistic director, Patricia McGregor, spoke at a rally held about a week later demanding their release, saying, “We will not be silent until the leaders of the Freedom Theatre are freed to be in continued conversation and do their invaluable work.†She did not mention Israel or the war in Gaza.
Since Cazares’s med strike began, the Workshop has turned off comments on its Instagram and blocked Cazares from seeing its Stories. Friends and collaborators have called and written emails asking it to support a cease-fire and end Cazares’s strike but have received no response. No one in senior leadership, past or present, would speak for an interview. In an email, McGregor wrote that NYTW is committed to theater that “expands our empathy,†which “includes work of Palestinian artists with whom we have deep relationships.â€
Cazares grew up about 20 miles outside El Paso in a shantytown called a colonia, an unincorporated neighborhood that doesn’t receive city services. “It was a real-estate scam from the ’80s,†they say. “Most of these places had no water from the city. We still don’t have a sewage line. It’s another form of apartheid.†When they were 14, they dug a dike so their family could access water. The architecture was creative and beautiful; residents were building their dream homes from whatever materials they had. Growing up, Cazares would go back and forth across the border to Juárez and the surrounding pueblos, where they would wait in interminable lines, their goods confiscated, their papers scrutinized, their uncle detained. When they learned about the experience of Palestinians — the Israeli-issued documents called hawiya that allow Palestinians passage in and out of Palestine; the humiliating security checkpoints — they could see a reflection of their own family’s history. “There’s something about being from the border that is incredibly linked to what’s happening in Palestine,†Cazares says.
One of their transformative experiences with theater occurred as a Dartmouth undergraduate studying abroad. They saw Ariane Mnouchkine’s Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées) in Paris, a two-part epic constructed from interviews with refugees. They can still see the opening: Long stretches of shimmering blue fabric transformed a bare stage into a raging river with a huddle of people trying to get to the other side. “Just instant tears. I remember that feeling and that sense of theater,†says Cazares. “This impossible thing: creating a river onstage. No words but the recognition of a family wanting to get from one side to the other and what they must be running from — that crossing this dangerous river is better than not.â€
Since the siege on Gaza, Cazares hasn’t been able to write. Instead, their strike has taken on the dimensions of theater with Instagram as their stage. As in their plays, death hovers nearby with a specter of inevitability; they draw strength from it by keeping it close. On New Year’s Eve, they began digging a shaft tomb about three feet deep in their parents’ backyard. Their partner and friends helped them dig. They enjoyed the process of seeing the various layers of earth. “I start realizing my body’s the one that’s going to be buried,†Cazares says, “that I have to start confronting quite possibly the reality of my own death.†Burials, they add, were the first form of theater, a way to channel grief and memory. Their great-grandmother died in 2010, and they remember spending the night at her house in Chihuahua with friends and family, her body in a simple wood coffin. The next day, they walked behind a pickup truck to the campo santo, the cemetery just outside town. They imagine doing a protest-cum-performance like that. “If I come back to New York, I’m going to come back in a coffin in front of the Workshop, still alive,†they say.
Still, the strike has gone on longer than they expected. On day 41, for the first time since they seroconverted, they were no longer undetectable. The longer this goes on, the higher their risk for stroke, kidney failure, and heart disease. Some of their friends and family have asked them to stop. Their sister-in-law told them, “No one’s asking you to do this, Victor. We need you here.†Others have asked, “Why are you risking your life for a white institution that is never going to care about your life?†“But I’ve given my life to theater,†Cazares responds. “This is my life.†They persist in their belief that the New York Theatre Workshop will do the right thing. “I believe they can do it. I believe they can do it,†they repeat. “I believe they believe it. I believe they know that calling for a cease-fire is the moral thing to do.â€
I ask Cazares how far they’re willing to go. “Oh, hospital bed,†they say. “The way I view my strike is physicalizing their inaction.†If the suffering of Palestine is a faraway, abstract concept, they hope their body becomes a bridge across that gulf: “Maybe they don’t feel much for Palestinians. They can’t imagine. But they’ve spoken to me. They can visualize my life. They’ve seen me be among them. What I’m hoping is that my life means something.â€
Correction: A previous version of this story stated that NYTW cancelled the production of I Am Rachel Corrie. According to the Workshop, it was “indefinitely postponed.â€