Larry of Arabia: Larry Kramer at the Movies

We appreciate Larry Kramer as an accomplished playwright, activist, and author, and rightly so. Larry wrote six plays over a 20 year period, beginning with Sissy’s Scrapbook in 1973 (later retitled Four Friends) and A Minor Dark Age, also in 1973. The first of his trilogy of plays about the experiences of AIDS in the 1980s, 1985’s The Normal Heart, is a totemic artefact of that time, and its eventual sequel The Destiny of Me (1992) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In between was Just Say No (1988), criticised for being too stridently anti-Reagan and which ran Off-Broadway for just over a month. The Furniture of Home — the original title for The Normal Heart — was developed in 1989.

The original production of The Normal Heart played 294 performances at The Public Theater Off-Broadway and starred Brad Davis in the lead role of Ned Weeks, a fictionalised version of Larry. It premiered in London in 1986 starring Martin Sheen (later replaced by Tom Hulce) and even enjoyed a run in Poland, where a filmed performance screened on Polish TV two months before the referendums there in 1987. The Sydney Theatre Company produced the play in 1989 and in 1994, Barbra Streisand (more on her later) hosted a script-in-hand reading that was generally understood to underscore her enthusiasm to produce and star in a film adaptation. The Normal Heart finally premiered on…