A Quiet End

A Quiet End is a 1985 play by Robin Swados (1953–). It was one of the earliest dramas to deal with the AIDS crisis in the United States. The play premiered as the inaugural production of the International City Theater in Long Beach, California, and then four weeks later at the Offstage Theater in London. Since then, A Quiet End has been produced at numerous theaters including the Repertory Theater of St. Louis, the American Repertory Theater (Amsterdam), Theater-off-Park (New York), as well as two revivals in Los Angeles and another in New York in September 2008. Swados also composed the underscoring for A Quiet End, which has been published as a single volume by Samuel French; as part of the anthology Gay and Lesbian Plays Today; and featured in The Best Men's Stage Monologues of 1990 and The Best Stage Scenes for Men From the 1980s (Smith and Kraus, 1990). A Quiet End was also the focus of a chapter of Robert Vorlicky's Act Like a Man: Challenging Masculinities in American Drama (U. of Michigan Press, 1995).