Plot

Directed by Emmy Award-winning director Paris Barclay, this presentation, the first after Kramer's death, is also the first time the Tony Award-winning play features a predominately BIPOC and LGBTQ cast. The all-star cast includes Sterling K. Brown (This Is Us, Black Panther); Laverne Cox (Orange Is The New Black, Promising Young Woman); Jeremy Pope (Hollywood, Choir Boy); Vincent Rodriguez III (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Insatiable): Guillermo Díaz (Scandal, Weeds); Jake Borelli (Grey's Anatomy, The Thing About Harry); Ryan O'Connell (Special, Will and Grace); Daniel Newman (Walking Dead, Homeland); Jay Hayden (Station 19, The House Bunny); and Danielle Savre (Station 19, Heroes). The virtual reading will include a special introduction by Martin Sheen.

First staged in New York City in 1985 at The Public Theater, THE NORMAL HEART went on to become the longest running play there. Dealing with the painful experiences of the early days of the AIDS crisis when everything was still mysterious, the play dramatizes the struggle among gay men over which strategies would save their lives. Larry Kramer was a distinguished novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, and a pioneering AIDS activist. In 1982, he co-founded Gay Men's Health Crisis, and then in 1987, he founded ACT UP. He died at the age of eighty-four in May, 2020. He is survived by his husband, David Webster.

This virtual reading is organized by ONE Archives Foundation and co-presented with Invisible Histories Project, a community-based Southern LGBTQ archiving and public history project, founded in 2016. It is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals on behalf of Samuel French, Inc.