Seven Days: Vermont's Independent Voice

Waking Life

At its 1985 debut, Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart was shocking, urgent and angry — an in-your-face wake-up call about the rise of an unknown disease strangely seeming to affect only gay men. Based on the early years of the epidemic since identified as AIDS, the play captures the passion, uncertainty and fear of the era while chronicling the efforts of Kramer’s largely autobiographical protagonist, an LGTB activist named Ned Weeks. A quarter of a century later, the production — which had a short Broadway run last spring — is still hard hitting: It “blasts you like an open, overstoked furnace,” wrote the New York Times. On World AIDS Day, Newbury actor Dan Butler (pictured) directs a staged reading of the play to benefit Vermont CARES and the HIV/HCV Resource Center.