Summary: When Larry Kramer’s play “The Normal Heart” premiered at the Public Theatre in New York in April 1985, the AIDS crisis had only just begun. President Ronald Reagan hadn’t mentioned the disease publicly; that would finally happen a few months later. It would still be two years before Kramer would found ACT UP and two years before the first AIDS memorial quilt would be assembled. The number of annual AIDS diagnoses wouldn’t begin to decline for another decade.
