AIDS Memorial Quilt displayed at Paul Green Theatre

Jerry Cohen. Roy Cohn. Howard Okorofsky.

These are among the 91,000 names honored in the AIDS Memorial Quilt, maintained by the NAMES Project Foundation.

Four 12-by-12 foot sections of the quilt will be on display at the Paul Green Theatre through March 6 to accompany PlayMakers Repertory Company’s presentation of “Angels in America,” playwright Tony Kushner’s award-winning play on AIDS in America.

Each panel of the quilt is created by friends, family or admirers in memory of someone who died of AIDS.

The entire quilt measures 1.3 million square feet.

Jeffrey Meanza, associate artistic director for PlayMakers — who also plays Louis Ironson in “Angels in America” — said he volunteered for the NAMES project while he was in college.

“I thought it’d be the perfect opportunity for us to showcase this on campus,” Meanza said.

“The play is so much about the silence that lingered among the lives of those people and about giving a voice to those folks suffering with AIDS and HIV.

“It feels like it’s for them. There’s a sense of ‘this is why we’re doing this play,’” he said.

Each panel measures 3 feet by 6 feet — about the size of a human grave.

“If you think back to the early days of the epidemic when people were talking about statistics and not really talking about real lives, real people lost to this disease. We needed a big visual to say, ‘here’s the evidence, don’t ever forget,’” said Julie Rhoad, executive director for the NAMES project.

The panels of the quilt on display at the theater range from simple to highly elaborate.

Some panels only display a name while others include pictures, poems and notes.

The panel dedicated to Kurt W. Massey has an entire tuxedo jacket beside a picture of him and his partner.

Two panels on the display are in memory of Roy Cohn, a lawyer portrayed in “Angels in America” who denied being homosexual and having AIDS.

“They’re not particularly favorable portrayals of him because he’s not exactly the most respected person in history,” Meanza said.

One of Cohn’s panels displays the words: “bully, coward, victim.”

Jeffrey Blair Cornell, who plays Cohn in “Angels in America,” said Cohn was ultimately a victim.

“All his power and all his influence and all his connections couldn’t save him,” Cornell said.

“The disease doesn’t care about human conceit or vanity.”

Pairing the quilt with “Angels in America” makes a great connection, Rhoad said.

“(It was) calling America’s attention to this disease in a very different way than other works had done, and calling on us to ask questions about life and the value of life and what that meant for us all,” Rhoad said. “I think the quilt did the same thing.

“Essentially, it’s almost impossible to walk away from the quilt unchanged.”

Contact the Arts Editor at arts@dailytarheel.com.