Kramer notes, “At various times in the action lists of names of actual people are projected up on the walls, the list short at first, and gradually growing in length until by the final moment the stage and all adjoining walls are covered with names” (18). When the play was revived for Broadway in 2011, rather than painting the walls, slides were used to project images on them. The theatre walls also bore the counts of cases in various states and major cities. (For example, on 1 August 1985, the figure read 12,062.) As the Centers for Disease Control revise all figures regularly, so did we, crossing out old numbers and placing the new figure just beneath it” (15). Kramer writes in the play’s production notes, “Principal place was given to the latest total number of AIDS cases nationally: _ AND COUNTING. The play’s 1985 production had sparse sets surrounded by whitewashed plywood, upon which facts and numbers were painted in black lettering. It was literally the writing on the walls. Kramer ensured that no one who watched his play could avoid acknowledging the acceleration of cases and accumulation of deaths. By the time the play’s action ends in May 1984, the Centers for Disease Control was reporting 10,000 AIDS cases in the US and 4,942 deaths. These cases were enough to warrant a single column article on an inner page of the New York Times.

The action in Larry Kramer‘s play The Normal Heart (1985) begins in July 1981, when there were 41 recognized cases of what would later become known as AIDS. “Plague! We’re in the middle of a fucking plague! And you behave like this!” – Larry Kramer

The normal heart play