When playwright Lester Mayers encountered the story of Robert Rayford, he could not stop thinking about the basketball.
Rayford was 15 when he entered a St. Louis hospital in 1968 suffering from symptoms doctors could not explain. He died the following year; testing of preserved tissue later revealed that he had HIV, making him the earliest confirmed case in the United States. Medical history turned the Black teenager into a case study. Mayers wanted to return his childhood to him.
“I kept thinking about how he lived,” Mayers says. “What was his summer like? What was his childhood like?”
Rayford stands at the center of “Catch,” Mayers’s docu-poetic play receiving its world-premiere workshop production at SUNY New Paltz’s Parker Theatre September 25 through October 4. Written and directed by Mayers, a 2019 graduate of the university’s theater program, the play moves between Rayford’s final year and the present, where a young person confronts an HIV diagnosis after discovering that a sexual partner withheld their status.
The play emerged from Tomorrow–12:01, Mayers’s 2025 collection of docu-poems honoring more than 100 people affected by HIV and AIDS. The project’s roots stretch back a decade, when Mayers shared the story of losing his mother to AIDS-related complications in 1998, when he was three, with the LGBTQ oral-history project I’m From Driftwood. After the Huffington Post republished the piece, messages began arriving from people eager to tell Mayers their own stories.
He saved them. Following the 2024 election, as HIV resources and funding came under renewed threat, Mayers returned to that archive. He conducted street interviews, gathered testimony and worked with student assistants at Ramapo College to uncover overlooked stories in newspaper clippings. He was also conscious that survivors of the epidemic’s worst decades were aging and their histories could disappear with them.
Mayers’s connection to that history is intimate. His mother was HIV-positive when she carried him, and throughout his childhood he was repeatedly taken to a free Brooklyn clinic for testing. Only later did he understand that his visits had contributed to research on maternal transmission. The experience left him with shame that he began unpacking in graduate school. His therapist urged him to remember childhood as he had lived it, instead of remembering only what had happened to him.
That instruction guided his portrayal of Rayford. In “Catch,” Robert dribbles a basketball, jokes, remembers the block where neighbors knew him by the sound of the ball and longs for more time to argue with his mother. “One of the rules of writing that I follow comes from Toni Morrison,” Mayers says, “which is to never make the story about the institution and always about the people.”
Around Robert, the play gathers voices from across the epidemic: a lover forced to sit four rows behind the family at his partner’s funeral; a child whose medication is hidden in a vitamin bottle; a nurse who remembers when treatment meant taking 32 pills twice a day. Past, Present, Future and three Ancestors share the stage, allowing histories separated by decades to speak to one another.
The contemporary story examines disclosure, consent and responsibility without offering an uncomplicated villain. Present feels betrayed after learning that a partner has withheld their HIV status. Yet Present has also stopped taking PrEP and avoided asking direct questions. Mayers describes trust as a door whose handle remains within reach.
“The rules of community also should exist between two people,” he says. “Taking care of each other, staying in conversations and being vulnerable is important.” The play challenges the “don’t ask, don’t tell” conventions of hookup culture, insisting that even a brief sexual encounter carries an obligation to recognize another person’s humanity.
That theme extends into the rehearsal room. Mayers developed the production with a cast of 12 SUNY New Paltz students, whose table work and improvisations helped deepen the Ancestors’ stories. One cast member playing a nurse is a nurse offstage as well, bringing firsthand knowledge of caregiving and the persistence of HIV stigma. For Mayers, returning to direct at his alma mater fulfills a goal he once imagined would happen after his death: seeing his name on a poster alongside the playwrights produced there.
The production’s greatest challenge, he says, has been resisting the tragic trajectory audiences and actors may expect from theater about HIV and AIDS. Earlier works arose when illness and death surrounded their creators, and their urgency remains. “Catch” belongs to a different medical era, one in which treatment can suppress the virus and allow people with HIV to live long lives.
“The theatrical stories about HIV almost always end in death,” Mayers says. “And this is a story about living.”
“Catch” will be performed September 25-27 and October 1-4 at Parker Theatre on the SUNY New Paltz Campus. A talkback will follow the Sunday, Sept. 27 performance, and a pre-show talk will take place before the Thursday, Oct. 1 show. Tickets are $10 for the public and $5 for SUNY New Paltz students.
