Vintage’s Bond goes center stage with ‘Normal Heart’

Oscar Wilde be damned.

Despite the novelist’s many famous musings on the tendency for life to imitate art, there’s still plenty of evidence to suggest the contrary. Just ask Craig Bond.

Bond, co-founder and owner of Vintage Theatre Productions on Dayton Street in Aurora, knows painfully well the desperate need for art — particularly live theater — to reflect the world’s woes and to provide context and catharsis amid the madness.

That acute, mirroring magnetism is what drew Bond from his typical, behind-the-scenes work as an artistic director and stage director to a rare, onstage role at the Vintage this winter. It’s a role and a topic that he’s intimately familiar with. He lived it.

“I think what drew me to the project as an artist was growing up in the ’80s and experiencing the AIDS epidemic as it ravaged the country,” Bond said. “I’m one of the last male actors of this generation that can remember it from being part of it and still do it justice. The newer generations don’t remember how AIDS affected people and just was the scariest plague to hit our nation in the last 30 years.”

More than five years removed from his last onstage role, Bond is portraying Felix Turner in “The Normal Heart,” a 1985 drama by Larry Kramer that depicts the early devastation of the HIV/AIDS epidemic that swept the country in the 1980s.

“It’s such a beautifully written piece, and it captures the spirit of ’82-’85 in this country before any funding came through, before Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor came forth, and before Reagan spoke the word publicly in ’87,” Bond said. “There’s so much to it, and I think we’re really doing the project great justice by bringing it back.”

Set to run from Jan. 15 to Feb. 21 at The Vintage, the show was a vital, almost obvious choice for the theater’s first production of 2016, according to its director Paul Jaquith, who first approached Bond about staging the show this year.

“I wanted to do this show because it has rarely, if not ever, been produced in the Denver or Aurora area, and it’s important,” Jaquith said. “It’s an important piece of history in gay culture and in a time when it is still so turbulent to be a homosexual in America, I think it is so prevalent to do this piece so that people can get a better understanding of what gay men went through in the ‘80s when AIDS first broke.”

Jaquith, who is returning to the theater for the first time in nearly two years, said that although the tone of the play has been scrutinized in past productions, he feels that it’s justified.

“Some say it’s too angry, but if you put yourself in the position where all of your friends and loved ones are dying around you and no one is helping you, not even the government, I think you would get a little mad too,” he said.

The show marks a milestone in Bond’s storied theatrical career, as he will perform for the first time on a stage he has quite literally built from the ground up. The production is Bond’s debut as an actor at The Vintage’s Aurora location, the entrance of which was recently adorned with the last names of both he and his partner, David Trimble.

“After 10 years of volunteering, our board of directors decided to honor us with a named theater,” he said. “It’s so awesome. For the first time, things have calmed down after moving here in 2012. Now I can take a step back and not worry as much about the fundraising, but just have a blast performing this amazing piece.”

The Vintage was formerly located in a portion of what is now the Vine Street Pub in Denver.

Bond graduated with a minor in theater from Elmira College in upstate New York, where he got early lessons in teaching the craft. Just before he graduated, a professor took a sabbatical and had Bond teach his acting and directing classes for the remainder of the semester. Bond never forgot that formative early experience and eventually named his company after that professor.

“He had a privately owned company called Vintage Theatre, and after I moved to Colorado his company disbanded and I decided to honor him by naming The Vintage Theatre as I did.”

Bond said that no matter the time in between roles, taking the stage is always a nerve-racking process — especially when you’re in charge of deciding which production to stage in the first place.

“I’m always nervous to take the stage because everybody is really critical when it’s the artistic director that gets to pick the play,” he said.

Nerves aside, Bond said that any potential anxiety is worth reminding people of the devastating impact of AIDS in the early 1980s.

“Hopefully it’s a history lesson that will start conversations,” he said. “It’s just great for people to remember.”