Accomplished (and Tony-nominated) Broadway producer Jordan Roth could rest on his laurels, or he could rest on good genetics: mom Daryl Roth is a veteran Broadway producer (and he got her good looks!), but, instead, he devotes a lot of energy to political concerns and societal woes. Here, this man on the move takes a break from his busy schedule to tell A&U’s B. Andrew Plant that every one of us must take responsibility for AIDS.

My trip by train this day seems unusually purposeful. I am headed in to New York City on the Long Island Rail Road, on my way to interview Broadway producing phenom Jordan Roth.

I am half preparing mentally for my interview and half “people watching.” I begin to wonder who else on this train has cause to think about the Modern Plague—today or on any other day.

Then, as if on cue, a woman across the aisle from me punctuates her already boisterous conversation with a loud remark about oral sex and swallowing. Obviously, safe sex was not at the forefront of her thoughts. Still, the gross outburst served to underscore my day’s purpose and subject matter.

Soon enough I arrive in Jordan Roth’s offices—just above one of New York’s performance destinations, Carnegie Hall—and am talking with the twenty-eight-year-old producer of the Tony-nominated The Rocky Horror Show. He greets me enthusiastically, fetches me water himself, and ushers us into the conference room he has commandeered as an office.

“What happened here?” he asks, examining a recently framed poster for one of his shows, noting that it looks like it has been damaged. He sets it out of (further) harm’s way and nonchalantly points out other show memorabilia, including a few be-feathered and cast-autographed items from his production of Rocky Horror. (The play was originally on Broadway in 1975; the cult-classic movie version, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (also 1975), may be more familiar to readers.)

We slide easily into a professional-but-casual interview mode. “Do I just start talking,” Jordan says—and does. It is soon apparent he can segue easily between articulate observations about the AIDS crisis and self-deprecating-but-informed comments about the fact that, as a teen, “I was one of those kids that thought way too hard about way too much.” The common thread for these two seemingly disconnected discourses is identity, he explains. In particular, sexual identity.

He is telling me how he became involved in the fight against AIDS, and his natural passion is refreshing. You see, normally, I ask something like, “When did AIDS first come on your radar screen?” With Jordan the perspective shifts because he cannot remember a time without the pandemic. He is of the generation for whom HIV disease is a given and a constant.

“In seventh grade health class, sex and safe sex and AIDS were in the same sentence,” he says, and goes on to theorize that, perhaps the inseparability of sex and AIDS (for people his age and younger) is the very reason some young people may seem to flirt with the risk of unsafe sex. In some way, Jordan ponders, “perhaps this is their way of trying to separate the two. Maybe that creates some allure; an allure that they can separate sex and AIDS.”

Strangely, Jordan’s sincerity and depth of thought about HIV and AIDS (and other big societal questions of the day) keeps the inseparability of sex and AIDS from seeming too morose.

Jordan’s ideas are not just lofty thoughts with no underpinnings. “You might say my activism started the summer after my sophomore year in college,” he tells me, “when I volunteered at Gay Men’s Health Crisis. I was an intern.” (About college: Jordan is a summa cum laude graduate of Princeton University.)

“As a newly ‘out’ gay man,” he tells me, “I was, ironically, assigned to work within GMHC’s Lesbian AIDS Project.” That assignment likely fed his broad and inclusive views about AIDS, he says.

“It was a fabulous experience,” he says, talking easily about the issues his GMHC time exposed him to and how the experience helped him identify signposts of the AIDS movement later on. He then does a short riff about HIV infection rates in various communities (“the alarming rise in AIDS infections among women, people of color,” and young gay men), AIDS and syphilis coinfection (“a stealth epidemic,” especially for gay men) and substance abuse as a portal for HIV transmission.

Jordan ultimately worked on a GMHC task force charged with exploring the epidemic-within-an-epidemic, the aforementioned “crystal meth” substance abuse, its ties to HIV infection, especially in the gay community, and the alarming prevalence of syphilis infections. “The work we did was part of an emergency effort to make policy recommendations to the GMHC board,” he says.

“A lot of what we found, and what I’ve looked at since…is the re-setting of community norms,” Jordan says. “How different communities view sex and safe sex and sexual identity. Do they see substance abuse as substance use? Do they see being gay or unsafe sex [itself] to be transgressive?” (Can you tell he was a theater and philosophy major in college?)

That kind of thinking is a staple for Jordan. He authors socio-political opinion pieces (on-line at www.Advocate.com, for instance) and gives his time to the AIDS and marriage equality movements. For the latter, Jordan serves on the steering committee of Freedom to Marry (www.freedomtomarry.org).

It may give you added perspective to know that Jordan Roth serves on the board of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, the American theater community’s response to this crisis. “It is a remarkable organization,” Jordan says. “More than twenty years into [the AIDS pandemic], the theater community continues to pour phenomenal effort and love and money and creativity into the organization’s efforts.”

Twice each year, for six weeks in the spring and again in the fall, Broadway casts come out onto stage after each show, make a little speech to the audience and ask for donations to fund AIDS work. Sometimes the pot is sweetened, as Jordan notes, like when The Boy from Oz star Hugh Jackman whips off his shirt and auctions it to the theater audience—all for the cause.

“Thousands of people, seeing eight shows a week, hear these messages,” Jordan says. “It is intensely powerful and intensely personal. This really helps many of them make the connection that AIDS is the fight of everyone’s lives. Even if [theater-goers] think they don’t know anyone who is affected [by AIDS], they see this community saying, ‘We need to tell you about this and you need to help,’ but in a comfortable way.”

About now, we circle back to one of Jordan’s themes, “a chorus of I’s.” His point: “We all have to say, ‘I will help end AIDS.’ We all set our own boundaries and expectations,” Jordan says, “and we must all say, ‘doing something about AIDS is my responsibility. I will do something about it….’”

“[Individually] taking responsibility for AIDS can bring people precariously close to conversations about blame,” acknowledges Jordan, “and that takes us into dark waters; that’s not where we need to go.” Rather, he says, the need is to avoid “fault and blame discussions and to decide individually what [difference we can make], large or small, and to start to work against AIDS from this point forward.”

Taking personal action against HIV/AIDS now has Jordan teaming with Broadway legend Harvey Fierstein. Growing out of their work with Broadway Cares, the two are starting a new campaign, drawing on the theme of personal responsibility.

“Our goal is for everyone—straight, gay, positive and negative—to accept responsibility to end AIDS,” Jordan says. “We’ll use words like, ‘AIDS stops with me,’ because…that can represent different [things] for different people.”

In addition to his work-in-progress with Fierstein, Jordan is helping Broadway revive Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart, which was revived off-Broadway at New York’s Public Theater in April, not long after my interview with Jordan. He called recently with the update that he and his mother, Broadway producer Daryl Roth, and some others, have stepped in to ensure the play will continue at the Public through the summer.

The play, which opened originally at the Public in 1985 and ran for a year, was sometimes criticized as melodramatic, but has turned out to be prophetic, because Kramer’s warnings of the widespread devastation of AIDS have become a sad reality.

The play won’t close at the end of summer: Jordan and his producing colleagues, including Mom, “are joining together to transfer it commercially.” In layman’s terms, that means The Normal Heart will move from the non-profit Public Theater to a commercial/for-profit venue on Broadway in the fall.

“We are so excited,” Jordan says of his team’s involvement with the play. “People who saw it then will see it now in a new way, and new audiences will have a new appreciation for…the early days of AIDS.”

I am appreciative that a lot of people in his chair—with a view of the Plaza Hotel and Central Park—might not even take time for an interview about AIDS. But I quickly learned that Jordan Roth’s community work and somewhat academic writings are vitally important to him.

After we conclude, I see some sights and end my day in The Big Apple by taking in the show Gypsy. Emphasizing a point made by Jordan earlier in the day, Bernadette Peters and the rest of the cast of Gypsy appear onstage after the performance, touting Broadway Cares, talking extemporaneously about the AIDS crisis and asking for donations.

On the hour-long train ride home I reflect on the philosophical-but-realistic and hopeful words of Jordan Roth. I am heartened that the talented young man who will bring The Mambo Kings to the Broadway stage next season—you heard it here first!—speaks just as passionately about his AIDS work as he does his work in the theater.

It’s good to know that Broadway cares—and that Jordan does too.

B. Andrew Plant is an Atlanta-based freelance writer and is Editor at Large of A&U. He interviewed Dr. Scott Hitt for the February issue.

June 2004