Two Christmas vacations ago, I could hear my son Felix upstairs whooping and hollering after a phone call from a community theater in the upstate New York town where he goes to college. He’d landed the leading role. His theater professor had gotten him an audition, but the company was actually looking for a high school kid, who would be closer in age to the 8-year-old central character.

Felix groused that the role was too demanding for a mere high school student, and his professor, a member of the company, agreed. In the end, the director decided that with his boyish good looks and sunny, easygoing ways, Felix was a natural for the role of a little kid. (He’s double-majoring in theater and computer science.)

I didn’t bother to learn anything about the play. Surprise me. Felix said only that it was written in the 1980s, called The Yellow Boat, and that the second line of the play was “this play is all about me.” I’m glad he told me, because I would have been the only one in the audience laughing at that line. Felix’s ego is comically robust. I mainly worry he’ll be tripped up by hubris.

As the weeks went by, his stories about rehearsals were the usual assortment of spats among cast members and disagreements with the director, nothing serious. He was having a blast working out the challenges of playing young Benjamin. And finally, when the show opened, my husband and I made the 3 1/2 -hour schlep out to the college town, got settled and went off to see the play.

I told the two women manning the ticket booth who I was, and that my son had reserved seats for us. With sudden and surprising interest, the two faces looked up at us, eyes glowing with a combination of admiration and deep sympathy. “Oh, you’re the parents,” they said. Each, with a hand on her chest, gushed about how talented Felix is. “Very moving,” one said, exuding feeling. Oh, and the tickets were on the house.

We took our seats, befuddled.

When the stage lights came up, Felix sat on top of a pile of oversized blocks, wearing hush puppies, a goofy striped shirt with a white collar, and pants belted too high. He was a delightfully credible 8-year-old. My husband and I snuggled up a bit to whisper that he’d done a delicious job of recreating the vivacious little kid he once was. We laughed. We were set to have fun.

But about 10 minutes into the play, Benjamin is diagnosed as a congenital hemophiliac. Oh my God. Suddenly, I put that fact together with the writing of the play in the AIDS-ridden 1980s, and realized with horror that I was about to spend the next 90 minutes watching Felix die. Not only is he going to die, but he’ll do so in the persona of the darling little kid he was well over a decade ago. Of course I wanted to kill Felix, who’s always loved to shock us. But this was torture. I seriously considered waiting in the hallway and letting everyone else watch him die. But I couldn’t move.

The play was written by a stage director, David Saar, who was the real-life father of a child who got AIDS and died from a blood transfusion, at a time when they knew little about the disease. The Yellow Boat was performed often in the wake of the crisis, as a way of putting a face on the then-mysterious killer. Its most memorable dramatic conceit was the understandable, if maddening refrain, echoed constantly: “We don’t know.”

When the father asks if Benjamin’s sudden refusal to communicate is a function of the disease or depression, the doctors reply that it could be either, both or neither. “We just don’t know.”

Saar wrote the role of the child with rich detail and personality. The other characters were the support and context for this adorable child, but not one of them had an involved, credible relationship with the kid. OK, so the play was about the kid and the disease. But the agonized stage parents stood by clutching one another, wringing their hands, working hard on soothing themselves. I was trying not to hate them for being so distant from, well, my kid.

The word had gotten out that Benjamin might have this terrifying new disease, so none of his friends would come to his birthday party. The play’s plot was a series of this sort of agony. When Benjamin asks his mom why no one showed up, the mom looks out at us, not the kid, and whines, “I don’t know.”

You don’t know? Tell him the freaking truth, or make something up, but don’t leave the kid in a sea of confusion. Get into the battle with him, so at least he knows he’s not alone. I get that you’re in pain — the anguish is only remotely imaginable — but hold him tightly, instead of looking for sympathy from us. Oy.

About three-quarters of the way through the play, Felix asked his stage parents “Does it hurt to die?” The audience groaned with the weight of the sadness. My husband lost it completely and sobbed quietly until the end, when he suddenly had to go to the bathroom and miss the curtain call.

I didn’t cry because I was enraged. I wanted to kill the stage mom. Primitive feelings urged me to leap up onto the stage, push the useless mother aside and take some real care of that kid myself. Get into his bed with him. Quit pacing around and clutching at the husband as if this were all about you guys. It is not about you. Your job is to tether powerfully to the kid. You are his strength, companion, fighting spirit, and good mood when he doesn’t have any. And if you say “I don’t know” one more time, I will tear you limb from limb. You are a bad mom. You disengaged just as the going got tough. If I could call the parenting police, they would come and throw you in the clink and get him a real mom.

All I remember about sitting in a restaurant after the show was my tremendous effort to be social over what was at the time an inexplicably blind rage.

I had nightmares for weeks afterward. They receded eventually, but just recently Felix once again died in a dream I had. He wore a goofy, little-kid shirt and beamed bravely as he succumbed to his untimely end.

The morning after the dream I found myself pounding around the house enraged all over again. What is this feeling? Ah, too many adults stand to one side, wringing their hands or better yet blaming others for the plight of the kids. Our culture is primarily concerned with things other than its kids. And this makes me crazy.

Anyway, Felix graduates from college today. Congratulations to him. And minor kudos to me for cleaving to him, often when he didn’t want me, even unto his all too convincing stage death. It was worth it.

Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, consults for government agencies and schools; she is co-director of Information Works!, Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can be reached at juliasteiny@gmail.com, or c/o EdWatch, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.