Pioneering AIDS play 'Normal Heart' revived just in time Actor Tim Cummings is quietly stripping on stage at Los Angeles' Fountain Theatre. Each item of clothing comes off with mounting dread. Now Cummings, who plays writer-turned-AIDS activist Ned Weeks in Larry Kramer's pioneering play "The Normal Heart," stands in his underwear, somewhat bow-legged. He faces the mostly empty theater looking like an oversized, bearded boy, helpless, his buff arms hanging loose at his sides. He lays down on a steel gurney. Dr. Brookner, what's happening? Cummings asks. "I don't know," the doctor replies flatly. The play takes its audience and cast back to 1981, when AIDS was an unnamed mystery virus infecting gay men in New York and the rest of the country mostly remained ignorant. Lisa Pelikan, as wheelchair-bound Dr. Emma Brookner, peers down her patient's throat with a tongue depressor, then gently massages his glands. Suddenly, Pelikan breaks character addressing a real doctor, a neuroscientist, sitting in the theater's front row with a script on her lap. Pelikan peppers her with questions: How do you properly hold a stethoscope? Which symptoms should she check first? Director Simon Levy watches intently from the corner of the stage. "I'm a real stickler for verisimilitude," he says, addressing the presence of the neuroscientist. This is the opening scene, so it's really important we get it right. The drama is in the details. The Fountain Theatre is taking this revival of "The Normal Heart," which runs through Nov. 3, particularly seriously. Kramer's semi-autobiographical work is a touchstone of arts activism and was the first play to give voice to the AIDS crisis of the early '80s. It was named "one of the 100 greatest plays of the 20th century" by the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain in 2011. "The Normal Heart's" world premiere, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, took place at New York's Public Theater in 1985; a different production, directed by Arvin Brown and starring Richard Dreyfuss, played in Los Angeles later that year at the Las Palmas Theatre. A more recent Broadway production earned a Tony for best revival in 2011. But the play hasn't been staged in Los Angeles for more than 15 years. The Fountain revival couldn't be more timely or, Levy says, more relevant. "People have fallen asleep again - especially in the gay community," he says, settling into a folding chair in the theater's cafe. Millions of people are dying from AIDS every year. But no one's talking about it anymore. We're all pretending that it's yesterday's illness. Pelikan first came to know the play through her ex-husband, Bruce Davison, who co-starred opposite Dreyfuss in the 1985 L.A. production. She says it's the new generation of gay men, still in their 20s, that she's most concerned about. "Even I didn't realize, until I started doing this play, how rampant the virus is right now and how young people don't realize there is no cure - there still is no cure," she says. The understanding of what AIDS is, I find, is very casual among young people. Set as it is in a micro-community of Manhattan between 1981 and 1984, "The Normal Heart" is a socio-political time capsule. But Levy cautions against labeling it a historical play. For one thing, there's a timeless love story at the play's core. And its themes - not just the AIDS epidemic but issues of gay marriage, the healthcare system, the responsibility of the media - are universal.