How Broadway Cares: A Theatrical History of the AIDS Epidemic

What can we learn about the history of the AIDS epidemic through the lens of Broadway performance and community? How did the AIDS epidemic affect Broadway theater history as seen through working conditions, representations on stage, and community organizing?

Through extensive archival work and interviews, How Broadway Cares: A Theatrical History of the AIDS Epidemic embodies the process of interpreting, understanding, and intervening in the lived experience, past and present.

With each chapter representing a distinct period of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, it analyzes the on- and off-stage reality of Broadway theater from the first documentation of the disease in 1981 to the present. Drawing on politics, economics, and changing medical discourse and practice, plays and musicals are evaluated as evidence of changing medical and social conditions through the implicit and explicit embodiment of HIV on stage. With community interventions extending well beyond New York City, not only Broadway productions, but philanthropic events, community formations, and documented practitioner experiences offer a simultaneously representative and unique cultural chronicle of HIV and AIDS in American society.

With richly detailed yet thoroughly accessible scholarships that draws on interviews, diary entries, court documents, newsletters, unpublished sheet music and other primary materials, this cultural history captures the impact of the epidemic off-stage as well as on. Whilst the presence of shows such as Angels in America, The Normal Heart and Rent, cannot be ignored, lesser examined contemporary plays and musicals are considered, raging from Harvey Fierstein’s Safe Sex (1987) and Christopher Durang’s produced but unpublished Sex and Longing (1996) through to musicals such as Michael Bennett’s Scandal (1985), Taboo and The Boy From Oz (2003) which in turn add much-needed nuance to the time capsule of canonized works of the period.

Developed from a series of popular undergraduate courses there is now an urgent need for this Broadway history to be made accessible and contextualized for a new and deeply interested audience coming to terms with the aftermath of a global pandemic.