JOE MANTELLO was a 22-year-old actor, trained in the classics and fresh to New York, when he set out for the Public Theater one snowy night in 1985 to see “The Normal Heart,” Larry Kramer’s play about the first years of AIDS. Watching the protagonist Ned Weeks — a blunt, opinionated gay man not unlike himself — Mr. Mantello understood his need to take action in the face of death and denial, he recalled recently. If others found “The Normal Heart” a statistics-laden screed, Mr. Mantello felt a visceral recognition that Molière and Sophocles had never triggered.

“I tend to go toward things that make me afraid,” Mr. Mantello said, “so as a young gay man in New York at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic I had to go toward it. I’d never connected to a character so much before.”

Soon afterward Mr. Mantello organized a reading of “The Normal Heart” in his fifth-floor walk-up at 96th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Fellow graduates of the North Carolina School of the Arts streamed past crack addicts in the lobby and took their places and scripts in a circle of borrowed chairs in Mr. Mantello’s living room. Silently he directed himself as Ned, a part he was burning to experience right away, because he had no reason to think he ever would. Mr. Mantello’s best friend, the actor T. Scott Cunningham, played Felix, Ned’s lover and, ultimately, his inspiration to keep fighting apathy toward AIDS.