There is something obviously historic, but also mythic, about Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart,which recently concluded a noteworthy run at Eastline Productions in Wantagh, New York. The show, one of only a few well-known scripts about the advent of AIDS in America, tells the story of a man’s efforts to attract attention to the disease, even before it had a name.
Just for the record, the term AIDS is never used in the play, because it’s set in New York, an epicenter of this epidemic, when the disease struck in the 1980s, manifesting almost out of thin air. Like a monster invading Manhattan, a real Sphinx crouched outside a mythic Thebes, the disease approaches and kills. And yet others unaffected go about their lives, ignoring the carnage. The show is about what it was like to be there, to try to save lives, to struggle and about accountability, passion and the pain of trying to lead an army into battle against AIDS when so many refused to fight.
Although Kramer’s play is an autobiographical account of his efforts to get others to acknowledge, fund and fight AIDS, it’s much more than a history lesson. Yes, it tells the story of the founding of GMHC, Gay Men’s Health Crisis (see the play and you’ll understand where the group’s name comes from: it’s in its own crisis, as well). It’s also a story about others’ infinite ability to ignore what doesn’t attack or affect them directly. The script’s rife with references to parallels to the Holocaust and even schisms that emerge in efforts to attract attention.
Edmund Burke wrote ,“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” The villain, in The Normal Heart, is the indifference of good people. Nobody’s evil, but many don’t want to let horror disturb their success.
The play lately seems to be in the midst of a revival, at theaters and in a TV movie, possibly because it’s a powerful drama whose lessons ring as true today as when it debuted about 30 years ago. This production, which places us squarely at the center of AIDS’ arrival, shows The Normal Heart to be as timely as ever. Good writing and acting are always in style. Daniel Higgins’ black-box production takes us back to that time with a minimal set leaving space for performances and acting to fill the air, but not for a history lesson any more than Death of a Salesman is a portrait of the past or Shakespeare’s Richard III is about events many years ago. This production is propelled by the engines of emotion, a shout on stage that makes us realize what we “normally” see is, at most, a whisper.
The “normal” heart, really, is Larry Kramer’s, reacting with passion and then frustration, while others’ indifference serves as the background to the echoes of the crescendoing heartbeat. The production is entertaining, but not just entertainment. We follow not the debate (debates are academic clashes of argument) but the passionate struggle over whether to shout or negotiate, blend or battle in a passionate play, even a passion play. The Normal Heart takes us inside the heart of the effort to get America to fight back and be accountable. The show’s always about life and death, when it isn’t about love. The stakes couldn’t be higher; the struggle couldn’t be more Shakespearean: a monster is at the gates of Gotham led by Mayor Ed Koch (a "bachelor"). We willingly ignore the beast, whether that monster is AIDS, the Holocaust or something else. Performances manage to mix crescendos with intimacy and personal experience. In this well-acted production, we feel as if we’re accountable for how we react to AIDS and, even if we know what happened, we feel it as we watch it arrive and attack all over. Emotional truth is the goal of theater. And it's here in spades. We watch America ignore AIDS and emissaries of Mayor Koch refuse to fund the fight. The New York Times is busy covering a Tylenol-tampering scandal on its front pages. We hear people downplay the disease – and we want to shout. We watch Evan Donnellan, as Kramer’s alter ego (Ned Weeks), struggle not only as the disease kills those around him – but with the recalcitrance of those around him. He is as loud as an alarm clock trying to wake America but also able to modulate from intimacy to fury. He is the unstoppable force, meeting the immovable object of a complacent society. He stomps around the stage, a bearded sort of bear, larger than life, as big as a Greek god in a Greek tragedy, constantly on the edge of an emotional explosion. Nobody hears Donnellan's Ned Weeks sound the alarm. Think Paul Revere while Boston sleeps. Ned lectures, but doesn’t address the audience, so much as trying to move the frozen hearts of those around him. He is always passionate, not professorial, imposing, but sometimes interfering with his own message. He isn’t teaching us a lesson as much as pleading for people to do the right thing – even when he knows they’ll refuse. He holds our feet to the fire and, finally, his own. He embodies’ Dylan Thomas’s advice to not "go gentle into that good night," but “rage” against the dying of the light. And in the end, we watch him consumed by a cancerous rage, if not by AIDS, leading to ashes rather than more conflagrations. Donnellan’s not only believable; he’s eminently watchable. He takes us back to the days when AIDS struck and shows us the face of desperation. His performance shows us that Ned’s tragic flaw may be that he lets anger get the best of him, becoming a shouter when a leader is needed, Malcolm X to a kind of Martin Luther King like Bruce Niles (played by Kevin Shaw). Donnellan’s Ned screams in disbelief that so many corpses could be ignored as the body count (underestimated by the Centers for Disease Control) mounts. He questions himself, rants against his brother Ben (played by Patrick Reilly as the consummate complacent professional) absorbed by his million-dollar house that turns into a two-million dollar mansion. Reilly plays the rest of America, focused on its own house, on money, personal satisfaction. He suffers from tunnel vision. If he believes Weeks is sick because he’s gay, how can he deal with a fatal disease manifesting itself? Weeks alienates, rather than recruits. How can everyone be so blind? Easy. Shaw as the cooler, buttoned up, more composed advocate is the water to Donnellan’s fire, calling for a quieter, conciliatory approach. A Citibank executive with a leonine mane of hair, he comes across as reliable, reasonable, a gay man who succeeded in the establishment, but possibly too calm, balancing two lives and two identities at a time when desperation is necessary. He isn't threatening and won't make even the most bigoted person uncomfortable. But is his restraint strength and strategy or cowardice? After all, one doesn’t recite “fire” in a burning theater. A shout is the only sane thing during a calamity. Shaw stands still and immovable, expressing true strength through silence rather than the noise of desperation. He’s the rock, the statue. And he delivers the final blow, the Brutus to Donnellan’s Caesar, announcing that the organization has removed Weeks from a leadership position. Weeks is the necessary fire to get things going. But in the end, he burns up and out in a blaze of anger – finally realizing that he may have become an enemy of his own ends. Kevin Kelly is perfect as the sophisticated, well-groomed, gay writer, the perfect haircut concealing the battered heart at The New York Times, which is ignoring AIDS. At a time when the gay friend was standard comic relief to stories, the Times seemed scared. When Nelson Rockefeller died in the arms of a woman who wasn't his wife, the Times said he died in "horizontal entanglement." How could it cover a disease spread through sex? The Times has argued it covered the disease, but Kramer has replied that the middle of the book hardly counts. Donnellan sounds a little bit like a Jesus trying to find his disciples, while running up against a world worried about other things. Weeks falls in love with Kelly’s looks, demeanor and character. Maybe even his weakness. As we watch Kelly’s character contract AIDS, at first he radiates false confidence. Success is his armor against the illness. He believes he will be the exception – he will survive. As he deteriorates, we watch Kelly’s armor come off, leaving him emotionally naked. He accepts some blame for not doing more. He didn’t want to risk his own success by being shrill. It’s a touching portrayal and a realization. Sometimes we see things clearest in the dark. Lisa Meckes, the only woman in the cast, plays Dr. Emma Brookner, the voice of reason, the Cassandra predicting catastrophe, quietly fierce, never righteous and always right, as cases multiply. Wheelchair bound due to polio (a widely defeated epidemic), she sees the tragedy approach and remains removed, yet rational, active and not an activist, another stable counterpoint to Donnellan’s combustible character. At first, we hear her predictions dismissed as alarmism. But soon they come true. Nobody can believe it at first: Think the Holocaust, the horrors of terrorism. By play's end, we hear about a body carted away in a trash bag when a medical examiner refuses to attribute cause of death. The disease may have killed the person, but society was an unrepentant accomplice. Money is the way government expresses priorities. The AIDS group shown in the play is repeatedly turned down for funding, before getting a paltry $9,000. The doctor, played by Meckes, is denied funding by a smug bureaucrat (played by Michael Schlapp who transitions smoothly and convincingly across four roles). Weeks shouts from the highest mountain (so to speak) in Manhattan, while Meckes patiently, persistently fights the quiet fight in the scientific trenches. Michael Carlin brings a delicate, vulnerable foil to the force of the group leaders. While Donnellan and Shaw fight a prize fight, he brings a gentler, more pleading, sometimes comic but always clear voice. His splashy, flashy clothes add a touch of Greenwich Village and show the only character flamboyantly, proudly flaunting the gay nation flag, so to speak. He doesn’t just deliver an eloquent speech but pours out emotion. How can sex be the villain? He won’t accept it. But we believe he cares immensely. He faces retribution on the job, a victim of a society that tries to deal with AIDS by banishing anyone with the audacity of announcing they're gay. Carlin's character is the only one openly gay in terms of stereotypical dress, tone and approach. Others wear suits or at least standard attire. Part of the problem may have been that gay people often were in the closet when AIDS hit. Being openly gay, which some may perceive as weak, was the consummate show of strength and courage. How can invisible people die when they don’t want attention and therefore don’t exist? Ghosts can't get sick. So what is this play about – beyond a struggle to survive, be heard and remain powerful under pressure when faced by a horrible threat? The Normal Heart addresses the fact that the shadows are a dangerous place to live one's life. We see the characters become at once amused and terrified when envelopes go out with GMHC’s full name – Gay Men’s Health Crisis (not center, which some may believe the last letter stands for) – as the return address. To get the nonprofit rate, they need the full name, not the acronym. Who will know the recipient is gay? The employer? Probably not. The mailman. Possibly. Does that matter? Yes. If you can’t even say the word gay, how can you stop a disease ravaging gay people? In that regard, the play is about acceptance, identity, honesty, integrity, truth, accountability and, of course, humanity. And that makes it more than universal: it’s emotional. Groucho Marx once joked that because his daughter was only half-Jewish, she should be able to wade up to her knees in the pool of a restricted club. Gay people were fighting discrimination by succeeding, trying to “pass.” They wanted to avoid discrimination and win through personal success. The price was a life in the shadows. Just when they were trying to get into the country club, they found a shark in the water waiting. After fighting hard not to be noticed, AIDS forced many out of the bunker. Daniel Higgins’ direction of The Normal Heart is what direction should be, at once invisible and omnipresent, getting powerful performances. He is not just a traffic cop, unless he’s an air controller making sure jets fly close but never quite collide. The production mixes the personal and political as we watch the actors trapped like mimes in an invisible box. It's always a passionate fight and never a day at the debating club. He shows us human beings, not ambulatory arguments. This play could easily devolve into preaching to the converted. It instead manages to be intimate and immediate. It is not simply about AIDS but about the passionate battle for attention from friends, society, media and even science. While many of us may believe we know the AIDS story, this lets us safely see what it was like from the inside at a time when America was in denial – and so were many gay people. This isn’t a morality play about a disease; it’s about the need to pay attention to danger and respect each other. If The Normal Heart has messages, they are as relevant today to everyone as they were when the play debuted at the Public Theater only blocks from St. Vincent’s Hospital, which has since closed.
Larry Kramer’s play is at once unusual among American classics (and it is one) in that it deals with politics and the story of an activist, but it is eminently theatrical. Not a la Brecht. And it is not an activist's call to action – as much as a playwright's call to conscience. In many ways, it fits in the tradition of Death of a Salesman. It is about someone with a dream that, really, shouldn’t be as difficult as it appears. “He’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid,” we hear about Willy Loman. “He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.” The same could be said about every human being whose suffering we ignore. We must pay attention to others’ agony or we become accomplices to it perpetuation.
Larry Kramer's alter ego Ned Weeks and the more suave and quiet Felix are the dual voices of our conscience. And we can never underestimate how many people will ignore their own consciences. We all want attention to be paid to something. To ignore this play, or this lesson, is to commit the same sin again, the sin of ignoring others’ agony in order to avoid having to struggle with it. To say the play merely rehashes events from decades ago is to mistake timeless theater for the time during which a play is set.
Based on the Eastline production, The Normal Heart deserves many more productions and revivals. Perhaps we couldn’t hear the truth back then, but today, distance may add clarity to the message. Larry Kramer didn’t simply write a great AIDS play, a work of propaganda or advocacy regarding settled subjects. This production reminds us that he wrote a great play, period.
