The Normal Heart: The Broadway Benefit Reading

Summary

The landmark play by one of the most influential playwrights of our time — Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, recorded live in a benefit staged Broadway reading at the height of the AIDS epidemic, can now be heard on digital audio for the very first time. All author and performer fees and royalties donated to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.

The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer's explosive drama of the early years of the AIDS epidemic, first opened to thunderous critical acclaim at New York City's Public Theater in April, 1985. Eight years later, as the plague raged on, a group of the stage's most celebrated talents joined forces in a benefit reading of the play to raise money and awareness in the ongoing fight against AIDS. Their performance is now Broadway legend—a one-night-only union of hearts and voices raised in anguish, anger and love that electrified the standing-room-only audience and confirmed once more the fiery brilliance of Kramer's landmark play.

A searing drama about public and private indifference to the AIDS plague and one man's lonely fight to awaken the world to the crisis, The Normal Heart follows Ned Weeks, a gay activist enraged at the indifference of public officials and the gay community. While trying to save the world from itself, he confronts the personal toll of AIDS as it touches the lives of the people closest to him.

This special presentation of the Broadway Benefit Reading of The Normal Heart captures this legendary night of theater forever. From the urgent poignancy of Barbra Streisand's opening remarks, to the incendiary performances of veteran director Jerry Zaks' superb cast, to the spontaneous outpouring of emotion at the final curtain, this is audio drama at its most powerful—an inspiring tribute to the power of theater, and a definitive and profoundly moving performance of one of the most important plays of our time.

Original reading produced to benefit the Treatment + Data Committee of ACT UP New York, April 18, 1993, at The Roundabout Theatre by David Binder, David G. O'Connell and James Calleri.