It's somewhat disquieting to note that nowadays a sung Broadway musical lyric about Ugandans suffering from AIDS can inspire laughs. Especially when you compare the situation to 26 years earlier when two seminal New York dramas focusing on the AIDS crisis were deadly serious in their approach to depicting the fears and horrors of the spreading and incurable disease.
This disorienting contrast was hit home to me earlier this year when I caught Broadway performances of the 2011 hit musical The Book of Mormon and a revival of Larry Kramer's 1985 drama The Normal Heart both on the same day. But the differences between The Book of Mormon and The Normal Heart also reflect where the theater world is in terms of depicting HIV/AIDS on stage.
Back in the 1980s and early '90s, AIDS would have been equivalent to an early and unfair death sentence. Yet nowadays with all of the drug treatments that help HIV-positive people lead longer lives, it's sadly understandable that American dramatists would tone down their urgency in trying to reach audiences about people who coping with HIV/AIDS.
Things were certainly different in the 1980s. The gay community ( which also heavily overlaps with the theater community ) was adversely affected by the spread of HIV and AIDS. It made sense that many theater artists were at the forefront in creating dramas about the disease. After all, it would be much easier to mount a play instead of having to deal with network TV executives or film studio bosses who would have been loathe to produce anything dealing with a disease overwhelmingly pegged to the gay community back then.
The first professionally produced play dealing with AIDS can be traced to Chicago in 1983. That's when the late Milwaukee-born playwright Jeff Hagedorn wrote One, a one-man show focusing on a young man's bewilderment with his newly diagnosed disease.
With its economical and portable cast size, One soon started cropping up in productions in gay bars. Another of Hagedorn's plays, The Layman's Guide to Safe Sex written in 1986, also was used by various AIDS foundations as part of outreach and education efforts.
But in terms of AIDS plays that really forced the nation to take notice, look to the 1985 plays The Normal Heart by Larry Kramer and As Is by William M. Hoffman. Both shows opened off-Broadway, but it was As Is that made the leap to Broadway in its original production starring Jonathan Hadary and Jonathan Hogan as a couple bravely sticking by each other as their sickness progresses.
Kramer's The Normal Heart was much more of a political and fiery indictment aimed at multiple targets like a morally neglectful New York City administration and a self-loathing gay community. Depicting Kramer's own contentious role in the rise of the organizations Gay Men's Health Crisis and ACT UP, The Normal Heart unflinchingly shows the struggles the gay community faced in raising awareness and the stark fear that grew out of not knowing exactly how HIV/AIDS was being transmitted.
Kramer layered on more invective against the Reagan administration with his 1988 play Just Say No, but it seems The Normal Heart will stand out more as a seminal AIDS drama ( and with its recent Tony Award-winning Broadway revival and plans for a forthcoming film version, expect to hear more about The Normal Heart in the near future ) .
Other major playwrights and performers touched upon AIDS in their work. Torch Song Trilogy playwright Harvey Fierstein touched upon AIDS in his commercially unsuccessful 1991 play Safe Sex, while Michael Kearns ( the first actor to out himself in Hollywood in the 1970s ) had success touring his 1989 one-man show Intimacies about different men with HIV ( a sequel followed called More Intimacies ) .
Gay playwright Terrence McNally weaved AIDS into his dramas, sometimes dealing with gay life like in the 1989 breakup drama The Lisbon Traviata or with straight family survivors in Lips Together, Teeth Apart in 1991. McNally's Tony Award-winning 1995 drama Love! Valour! Compassion! memorably featured two characters struggling with their HIV status, finding an initial love that unfortunately doesn't pan out.
There was even room for a hit AIDS comedy in 1992 from Paul Rudnick called Jeffrey, about a gay man who gives up sex out of fear of contracting the disease, only to struggle with his new stance when he meets the guy of his dreams who is HIV positive.
Lesbian playwrights also contributed to the cannon of AIDS dramas, notably Paula Vogel with her 1992 work The Baltimore Waltz ( about a woman who images that she has the incurable disease and not her gay brother ) and the 2003 drama The Long Christmas Ride Home ( which features a man in a moment of low self esteem who gets infected with HIV in a bar's backroom ) .
In terms of musical theater, works touching upon AIDS emerged liked the 1989 song cycle Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens by lyricist Bill Russell and composer Janet Hood inspired by the NAMES Project AIDS memorial quilt. Also notable is the 1997 off-Broadway musical The Last Session by Jim Brochu and Steve Schalchlin about a gospel songwriter with AIDS who plans on committing suicide following one final recording studio session.
The first Broadway musical to overtly deal with AIDS grew from composer/lyricist William Finn and director/playwright James Lapine's so-called "Marvin Trilogy" of one-act off-Broadway musicals dealing with a man coming to terms with his homosexuality ( In Trousers in 1979 ) , living openly as a gay man after leaving his wife and son ( March of the Falsettos in 1981 ) and later watching his gay partner die from AIDS ( Falsettoland in 1990 ) . Finn and Lapine both won Tony Awards for their work when the latter two one-acts were combined together for a two-act Broadway musical called Falsettos in 1992.
But when it comes to the highest-profile Broadway works dealing with HIV/AIDS, there's no denying the impact of Tony Kushner's 1993 epic Angels in America ( split up into two parts as Millennium Approaches and Perestroika ) and the late composer/lyricist Jonathan Larson's Rent from 1996. Both works won Pulitzer Prizes for drama and became global phenomenons.
Kushner's "Gay Fantasia on American Themes" was a massive work blending magical realism, comedy, Mormon history, real-life figures like Roy Cohn and steely political criticism of Reagan-era politics. But most importantly in that heady mix was clearly endearing characters you could identify with and care about.
Angels in America benefited from an acclaimed HBO mini-series adaptation and it continues to be produced ( an off-Broadway production at the Signature Theatre in New York was a sold-out success, while Chicago's Court Theatre has scheduled both parts of Kushner's opus for 2012 ) .
Rent was Larson's modernization of Puccini's 1896 opera La Boheme, but transported from 1800s Paris to the 1990s in New York's East Village where the scourge striking down some of the bohemian artists isn't tuberculosis, but HIV/AIDS contracted sexually and from intravenous drug use.
Rent gained an added poignancy when Larson died following the show's final off-Broadway dress rehearsal from an aortic aneurism ( not of AIDS as many had assumed ) . With its powerful anthem "Seasons of Love" ( which was performed at the 1996 Democratic Convention ) , Rent was seemingly everywhere as it racked up awards and a multi-year run on Broadway ( at this writing, it's the ninth-longest running show in Broadway history ) .
That isn't to say that Rent isn't without its critics, notably activist Sarah Schulman who alleges in her book Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America that Larson stole the musical's plot from her. Other critics took the show to task for overly romanticizing AIDS, and questioned why Rent's most effeminate gay character, the HIV-positive drag queen Angel, is the only person to die in the show.
Rent also wasn't helped by a less-than-effective 2005 movie version starring much of the original Broadway cast. A much better representation is a taping of the show's final 2008 Broadway performance that is also available on DVD.
But it looks like you can't keep Rent down, even though the show has become a period piece. A new off-Broadway production in New York opened earlier this year featuring the show's original director and producers.
So what is next in the chapter of plays dealing with HIV/AIDS? Clearly the current runaway success of The Book of Mormon will put its authors Matt Stone and Trey Parker ( those irreverent creators of South Park ) and Avenue Q composer Robert Lopez into the theater history books. But the journey of AIDS in theater from heart-wrenching dramas to a sung punchline is certainly one that I'm sure many people never expected.
