Everything in the Tony-Nominated Normal Heart Happened

By Robert Simonson
09 Jun 2011

Larry Kramer
Larry Kramer
Photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN

Over a quarter-century after the start of the AIDS epidemic, playwright–activist Larry Kramer's play, a work "full of ghosts," still haunts.

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The most surprising entry of the 2010-11 Broadway season was the late arrival — very late, late-April late, 26 years late — of The Normal Heart, the seminal 1985 drama about the early years of the AIDS epidemic. And no one was more surprised than its author, Larry Kramer.

"I'm living right now in a world that is a very foreign country to me," says the 75-year-old playwright while sitting in a cluttered Greenwich Village apartment dominated by two huge flat-screen computers and the books and papers of a lifetime of writing and activism. "Sure, it's nice, but I'm all fatootsed."

Anyone would be fatootsed — exhausted and confused, that is — by the whiplash-inducing circumstances that ferried the decades-old play to Broadway. The journey began with a starry reading of the play at L.A.'s Geffen Playhouse in May of 2010. Joel Grey — who played antagonistic protagonist Ned Weeks in the original 1985 production at the Public Theater — directed. He returned to New York and asked producer Daryl Roth to back a similar reading in New York. She agreed. Soon after, Grey ran into Joe Mantello, the Tony-winning director of Wicked who has famously sworn off his former profession of acting. "If you're ever looking for a Ned Weeks," Mantello told Grey, "it's the one part I've never played that I always wanted to."

"When I heard that," recalls Kramer, who remembered seeing Mantello in Angels in America, "I said, 'Go for it.'"

Joe Mantello in The Normal Heart
photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN

The reading, held on Oct. 18, 2010, at the Walter Kerr Theatre, was a stunning success. Roth committed that night to taking the play to Broadway, if she could assure a theatre and Mantello's involvement. By February, both securities were in hand.

"We put this together in 16 days, from the first reading to the first preview," said Kramer on the day of the Broadway opening (his dress for the evening: black overalls), still not quite seeming to believe his luck.

There was talk of a Broadway berth back in 1985, when Joseph Papp produced the play at the Public. The bruising story, set in the early '80s, dramatizes the outbreak of the AIDS crisis in New York and one group of gay men's fight to win recognition of their plight from a seemingly indifferent media and mayor. The action, centered on the irascible, enemy-making firebrand Ned Weeks, is largely drawn from Kramer's own experiences founding — and eventually losing control of — the Gay Men's Health Crisis, now the world's largest private organization assisting people living with AIDS.

"As Is, by William M. Hoffman" — another significant play of the time that dealt with AIDS — "opened right before we did," says Kramer. "Everyone gave it a rave. So As Is went to Broadway. We got just as good reviews...but Joe Papp said, 'As Is is not doing well on Broadway. Here you have a home.' He ran it and ran it. That's why we didn't go to Broadway. And he was probably right."

 Continued...