The first day of play rehearsal is a lot like the first day of school. ’Fits are crisp, jitters are high, and everyone has a smile. People are catching up with former colleagues and making new introductions. 

It’s May 1, and the cast, crew, and production team behind Mosaic Theater Company’s One in Two has convened for the first time in a back room of Atlas Performing Arts Center. The play opens exactly one month later, on June 1.

It’s also a showing of who’s who in the local theater scene. Award-winning director Raymond O. Caldwell, the producing artistic director at Theater Alliance and a former faculty member and resident director at Howard University, is moving about, shaking hands and chatting with various staff. His “I love go-go” cap silently declares D.C. pride. The play’s three actors sit together at a table in the center of the room finalizing paperwork. 

To describe Michael Kevin Darnall, Justin Weaks, and Ryan Jamaal Swain as “big fucking deals” might just undersell them. In the past year, Darnall starred in Katori Hall’s Hot Wing King at Studio Theatre, for which he received a 2023 Helen Hayes award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Performer; and most recently he played Louis Ironson in Arena Stage’s production of Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches. Weaks, described as  “superb” by WCP theater critic Chris Klimek, starred alongside Darnall in Tony Kushner’s opus, taking on the role of former drag queen and AIDS ward nurse Belize; on May 22, Weaks won an Outstanding Lead Performer honor at this year’s Helen Hayes Awards for his work in Woolly Mammoth’s There’s Always the Hudson. Fans of TV’s Pose, the 2018–2021 drama series about Black and Latinx queers in New York’s ballroom scene of the late 1980s, will recognize Swain for his role as Damon Evangelista. (Caldwell later describes the three men to City Paper as “just so absolutely brilliant.”) 

The brilliance of these queer men, including Caldwell’s, will become evident once again in One in Two. The play asks its three and only actors to know all three parts—every line, every stage direction, every piece of every costume. Because, before each performance, the audience will pick which of the actors plays the lead character, Donté (also referred to as #1). The other two actors will take on the roles of #2 and #3 after a short game. 

“At least if I forget my lines, I can ask one of these guys,” Darnall tells City Paper. 

If it’s not abundantly clear, the room (and the play this group will create) is so queer it’s palpable. Gay inside jokes are a constant, and the room lights up with laughter.

It’s no coincidence that Mosaic scheduled its production of Donja R. Love’s “whimsical theatrical experiment”—as described by Mosaic—to coincide with Pride Month. One in Two offers an intimate look into the life of a young Black queer man recently diagnosed with HIV. The story moves through the past and present of Donté’s life as he grapples against the stigma of contracting HIV, while reveling in both adult and childlike humor. Written by Love during his personal struggle fighting against the same stigma, One in Two is named after a 2016 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that predicted, “If current HIV diagnoses rates persist, about 1 in 2 Black men who have sex with men … will be diagnosed with HIV during their lifetime.”

“I’m a gay Black man living in America,” Caldwell tells City Paper when asked why he wanted to present One in Two now. “I am always so interested and fascinated in putting Black experiences and Black stories on stage that we’re not talking about. When I think about the Black gay community, we aren’t having enough conversations about what’s happening, but we’re also not having conversations about HIV/AIDS. I think we assume that—because PrEP—AIDS is over.” 

PrEP, short for pre-exposure prophylaxis, is a medication introduced in 2012 that, when taken regularly, is roughly 99 percent effective in reducing the spread of HIV through sex. Despite this major medical advancement, not everyone has benefited equally. According to Jesse Clark, associate professor-in-residence in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of California, Los Angeles’ David Geffen School of Medicine, “PrEP has dramatically reduced the number of new HIV infections, especially among white and affluent populations … [but] there is still much work ahead to ensure more people at risk can access PrEP, especially those from racial and ethnic minority communities.” The CDC report that inspired One in Two was released four years after PrEP became available.

Caldwell, addressing the implied assumption that AIDS is over, continues, “We know that’s not the case. There’s still stigma around HIV. There’s still stigma throughout Black communities that are stopping us from having the conversations that we need to have.” 

The virus continues to have a deep grip on D.C. According to a 2021 report from Kaiser Family Foundation, more than 50 percent of new HIV diagnoses in the U.S. occur in D.C., San Juan, Puerto Rico, and 48 other counties. In February, DC Health released its annual surveillance report on HIV and sexually transmitted infections, which found that 230 Washingtonians were newly diagnosed with the virus in 2021.

The latest numbers, which date back to 2021, show that 11,904 D.C. residents—1.8 percent of the population—are living with HIV. But the report comes with a major caveat: The pandemic greatly impacted the city’s recent statistics as testing centers and preventive care were limited during the height of lockdown, leading to concerns of underreporting and underdiagnosis.

The report confirms that Black (and Latinx) residents are disproportionately affected by the virus. Black people account for roughly 44 percent of D.C.’s population, yet they make up 71 percent of Washingtonians living with HIV. The report also affirms the CDC’s warning: One in two newly diagnosed patients in D.C. in 2021 were Black men. 

The avidness to create conversation—not just around HIV, but also the local community of Black queer men—is the driving inspiration behind Caldwell’s latest production. The director has lived locally for 15 years. He’s spent time at the city’s gay bars and taken part in its many gay sports leagues. Many of the best-known spaces are very White, he keenly observes.

“Our queer spaces are still incredibly segregated,” he says, using the city’s two Pride weekends as an example. “There’s the Black Pride weekend, when anyone who’s Black really comes out and really parties, and then everyone within the Black community calls it White Pride. And all of the White people just call it Pride.” 

The divide between Black and White queer and trans folks is doing the greater LGBTQIA community a disservice. In Caldwell’s opinion, a more united queer front would be best positioned to help the city think about race in more nuanced ways. The thread of shared experiences—coming out, building a chosen family, navigating life within a marginalized space—ought to be a unifier across the racial divide and lead to conversations addressing that divide. 

“Our community actually has the deepest potential to demonstrate the widest breadth of diversity,” Caldwell adds. “But that asks us to actually be in space together. That asks us to actually know one another’s struggles. … Queerness allows us to really understand or imagine all the varieties of the human experience. That’s the beauty of being queer to me.

“So how do we use that power to also have these tangential conversations about race, about socio economics? I think the queer community is poised to do that—could be so poised to do that, if given the vocabulary,” he concludes.

That’s where One in Two enters the picture. Theater is supposed to create worlds outside our limitations, provide new ways of looking at the spaces we inhabit, and ask questions about how to move forward.

“Theater is such a beautiful vantage point because it is definitely entertainment, but I think through … entertainment is where you get to people’s souls,” Swain says a week after the first rehearsal. Although the Howard University alum became widely known for his role in Pose, Swain has been a stage star for more than a decade, acting in New York’s world premiere of James Ijames’ Kill Move Paradise and numerous local productions including Keegan Theatre’s Six Degrees of Separation and Thoughts of a Colored Man at GALA Hispanic Theatre.

When we met at the first rehearsal, Swain, a Birmingham, Alabama, native, had a bounce in his step and a smile for everyone—clearly happy to be back in D.C. and once again part of Caldwell’s cadre. Caldwell has been Swain’s mentor since they met when Swain was a freshman at Howard. At that time in his life, the actor says, he needed guidance.

“We shared something in rehearsal this week about self saboteur,” Swain says during a follow-up call. “How it really isn’t necessarily like you’re doing something harmful to yourself, but it’s your spirit, at that moment, doing the thing that it needs to do to feel protected … When I reinvestigate that time in my life, nobody was teaching a young, Black queer man the certain levels of protection that he needed in order for him to protect himself and bring himself joy and make the right decisions, but also how to interact with the world.” He credits both Caldwell and Howard University for helping him make a supported transition into an adult and an artist. 

At the start of this year, Swain decided 2023 would be both pivotal and personal. His decision was born from tragedy: In the summer of 2020, around the time Pose was renewed for its third and final season, Swain’s sister was killed, and he decided not to return to the series. As the world emerged from the worst of the pandemic, Swain felt it was time to “come back home” to grow, heal, and “go into my next chapter of my life.”

He knew he wanted to use his voice and platform for social change and recognized D.C. as an ideal place.

“People doing soul work that really illuminates personal and pivotal stories have the opportunity to evoke change in someone’s heart, mind, and spirit,” he says. “And we need that. ”

At 29, Swain is conscious of the realities Black and Brown queer people face, as well as the impact HIV has had on both his community and the greater LGBTQIA community. He credits his time on Pose for helping him better understand what it meant to live with HIV in the 1980s, during the height of the epidemic. “It really changed in me the sense that it’s only an addition to someone’s story,” he says.

“I found with entertainment prior to [Pose]—Normal Heart, Angels in America, Philadelphia—there was always this really scary overtone, and yes, there are things that we must worry about with the virus, but there was little life being lived in these [stories],” he adds. “It almost made it very, very stigmatized … I think that, with Pose, it really opened my eyes to ‘yes, this can be a part of your tapestry, but you still show up for your life.’” 

That idea of a life tapestry is fueling both Caldwell and Swain in their work on One in Two. For a play described as “whimsical,” Caldwell seeks to understand how we develop a story and a conversation that doesn’t only center trauma, but also joy. Because, as both men will tell you, there’s plenty of joy in Black communities, LGBTQIA communities, and—obviously—within Black queer and trans communities. (When asked about the dichotomy of queer life: oppression from outside forces versus self-created bubbles of queer joy, Swain says, “Ya know, honey, l don’t wanna be nowhere else. No. Where. Else.”)

“I think those of us who have been part of communities that have been marginalized, disenfranchised, recognize that, sometimes, you got to laugh to get through the pain,” Caldwell says, expanding on the emphasis of queer joy in One in Two, but also his directorial work as a whole. The stories he looks to produce could easily be categorized as “Wow, that’s some sad work,” he intones, dropping his voice into a low pitch. “‘These are hard conversations.’ But I actually think that my activism is joyful.” For Caldwell, the idea of community coming together to process collective trauma—be it racism, transphobia, drag bans—brings a sense of comfort. And, on a smaller scale, that is exactly what’s been happening in the production’s rehearsal room.

“A production like this, I find it really beautiful, every day, to be in a very queer room, asking ourselves how we are developing a queer world and the joy that’s associated with that. There aren’t eyes telling us ‘No, we can’t.’ But instead, we can be everything and anything we want to imagine and put anything we want to imagine in this world,” Caldwell says. 

As the first rehearsal begins, Caldwell says to the room: “I don’t know a play that can change the world.”

He doesn’t say this to undersell the story. He does it to remove the pressure from his cast and crew. But it’s also a reminder: “If there was a play that did change the world, it would be put on right now,” Caldwell later explains to me with a laugh. 

“But there is a lot of theater that’s happening throughout the United States, throughout the world, that’s starting incredible conversations and really hyper local, specific conversations. And those conversations can inspire people to want to change the world.”

Swain is already looking forward to the conversations to come from One in Two. “I’m sitting here thinking about the play,” he says when asked about its relevance during Pride month. “It has very deep, dark truths, but … Black and Brown people always find joy and laughter through it. I just want Black people to understand [that] Black and Brown people, queer folk are more than the things that are happening upon them. That we come from a very vibrant, very vivacious community of people. A tribe of folk that have done one of the most incredible things: to choose their truth over their safety.”  

He pauses. “I think I’m excited about Black and Brown folk and queer folk falling back into the love affair with themselves,” he adds. 

Mosaic Theater’s production of One in Two, written by Donja R. Love and directed by Raymond O. Caldwell, opens June 1 and runs through June 25 at Atlas Performing Arts Center. mosaictheater.org. $29–$64.