Theatre: The Normal Heart at the Courtyard Studio deals with AIDS and love

With the recent debate about same-sex marriage in Australia, Larry Kramer's 1985 play The Normal Heart has achieved a new, poignant relevance. Kramer was writing about the start of the AIDS epidemic, when a new, mysterious disease was killing many homosexual men in the early 1980s. The response from officialdom and the media was slow and Kramer dramatises the reaction of a group of gay men in New York City, where the new plague was hitting people in their circle hard. They were trying to draw public and government attention, combat the effects and look for answers as best they could, even though they didn't always agree on the best way to proceed, while also carrying on with their own personal and professional lives.

Jarrad West co-founded the company, Everyman Theatre, that is producing The Normal Heart and plays the lead role of writer and gay activist Ned Weeks, a fictionalised version of Kramer himself, who forms an organisation, modelled on the real-life Gay Men's Health Crisis, focused on raising awareness of the mysterious illness. Dr Emma Brookner (Jordan Best), a polio survivor, is one of the few doctors to have much experience in dealing with the disease but even she doesn't know much about it initially and encourages sexual abstinence among gay men until more is discovered.

"All the characters in the play are analogues of real people or composites," West says.

Conflicts arise in the organisation between the more fiery activist Ned, who prefers direct, confrontational, attention-getting strategies for action and the lower-key, more discreet Bruce Niles (Chris Zuber), who's closeted and fears being fired from his job if his homosexuality is made public – as does Ned's lover, Felix Turner (Will Huang), a New York Times writer.

Ned also has issues with his brother Ben (Rob DeFries), whom he asks to help fund the organisation but is, he suspects, not entirely comfortable with Ned's sexuality.

Working on The Normal Heart hits particularly close to home for some of those involved in Everyman Theatre's upcoming production who personally lived through the onset of AIDS. Director Karen Vickery was a student at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney the early 1980s and remembers it all too well.

"It was the period of the full force of the crisis in Australia ... we lost a number of extraordinary people," she says, naming conductor Stuart Challender, director Richard Wherrett and actor John Hargreaves as well as her flatmate at the time as being among those in the Australian arts community who have been lost to AIDS.

She also remembers seeing the first Sydney Theatre Company production of The Normal Heart in the late 1980s.

"It was so powerful. I've never forgotten it."

Vickery says the response to AIDS in Australia was a lot better at the time than it was in the more conservative climate of the US.

"The key to it – and we all remember the Grim Reaper ads – was that it was super healthy acknowledging that people do have sex and that there are all kinds of different relationships."

Michael Sparks plays veteran Jewish gay activist Mickey Marcus, who writes a public health column for the New York City Department of Health and remembers the struggle for gay liberation.

"He was on the frontline 15 years before in Stonewall," Sparks says.

"My character is paranoid – he thinks, 'They're going to lock us up."'

Sparks was even closer than Vickery to the world the play depicts. From 1985 to 1987 he was a volunteer "buddy" for the real-life Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York City, providing home help for people living with AIDS – undertaking such tasks as accompanying them to medical appointments, doing their shopping and cleaning up after them, and visiting them in hospital.

It was very taxing, both physically and emotionally and all six of his clients, who were in different stages of the disease, died while he was working there.

"My last client, an elderly man, took longer to die than any of the others: 18 months," Sparks says.

"I burned out in just under two years."

One thing that was particularly hard, he says, was when a dying man – usually Hispanic – did not want his family to know he was gay or had AIDS.

"More than one mother in the hospital would say, 'Tell me the truth.' It was not my job to tell them the truth."

All three – West, Vickery and Sparks – say that while medical science and social attitudes may have moved on regarding homosexuality and AIDS, the play is both dramatically effective and still timely and relevant..

West says the title, The Normal Heart, refers to the idea that gay or straight, "We're all the same; it's all the same heart; it's all the same thing."

Everyone, he says, should be free to love and not be afraid to say who they love.