

It features the definitive text of the play, extensive supplementary material including a new introduction by critic and broadcaster David Benedict, and tributes to Larry Kramer by Russell T Davies, Tony Kushner and Matthew Lopez, all of whom have also contributed to the canon of dramatic work about HIV/AIDS - with, respectively, It's A Sin, Angels in America and The Inheritance. This new edition of the play is published alongside a major revival at the National Theatre, London, in 2021, directed by Dominic Cooke. It was revived on Broadway in 2011 (winning the Tony Award for Best Revival) and adapted for television in 2014 (receiving the Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie). In response to the AIDS crisis he founded Gay Men's Health Crisis, which became the largest organization. He was nominated for an Academy Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and was twice a recipient of an Obie Award. Thirty-five years after that premiere, the play's prescience and its searing emotional power are beyond doubt. Larry Kramer (born June 25, 1935) was an American playwright, author, public health advocate and gay rights activist.

The play received its British premiere at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1986. Thats how I want to be defined: as one of the men who fought the war. The Normal Heart traces the story of one man who, while his friends are dying around him, strives to break through a conspiracy of silence, indifference and hostility from public officials and the gay community, and gain recognition for a virus that threatens to change everything. And until we do that, and until we organize ourselves block by neighborhood by city by state into a united visible community that fights back, were doomed. Larry Kramer's passionate, polemical drama, set during the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.
