While Washington has a role in the story, Larry Kramer’s prescient 1985 play, “The Normal Heart,” is just now being staged here for the first time. The production, fresh from Broadway, coincides with an international AIDS conference that’s returning to the U.S. this summer and is expected to draw 20,000 attendees from around the world.

Arena Stage is producing the show, which won the 2011 Tony Award for best revival on Broadway. The new production starring Patrick Breen and Luke MacFarlane of TV’s “Brothers & Sisters,” runs through July 29 before the show moves to San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater.

The story promises to find an even larger audience in the months and years to come with a planned movie from “Glee” creator Ryan Murphy starring Mark Ruffalo and Julia Roberts.

While set in New York, Washington is the most important city for the play to be seen, as the power center for politics and health policy, Kramer told The Associated Press.

In the play, his ranting alter ego is Ned Weeks who bemoans New York Mayor Ed Koch’s apathy, the reluctance of The New York Times to write about AIDS and the refusal of President Ronald Reagan to acknowledge the disease. He also condemns gays for refusing to change their sexual behavior when it began to prove deadly.

Thirty years after Kramer’s story, his message is the same, though the audience may have changed. AIDS infection rates continue to rise.

“It’s still a plague, it’s still raging all over the world, and there’s still nobody paying attention to it on an official level,” Kramer said, noting the death toll has risen from the hundreds in the early 80s to tens of millions. “Everything in the play came true. So it’s now a history play.”

The story unfolds in a New York doctor’s office in 1981 — before an AIDS epidemic had been declared.

Patients line up to see if they’re showing any symptoms. Dr. Emma Brookner, played by Patricia Wettig best known for her role as Holly Harper on “Brothers & Sisters,” delivers her best guesses and tough love to counsel patients.

“All I know is this disease is the most insidious killer I’ve ever seen …and I think we’re seeing only the tip of the iceberg,” Emma tells Weeks, urging him to take action.

“Tell gay men to stop having sex,” she says.

Wettig told the AP she wanted to join the cast after seeing “Heart” on Broadway, living in New York in the 1980s and knowing people who died. For her, the story now has “more potency, more power.” She said the nation seems ready to hear the story and more people feel a personal connection.

In the play, Weeks, like Kramer, went on to co-found the activist and support group Gay Men’s Health Crisis to push politicians, doctors and the media to take AIDS seriously.

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