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.