AP, NEW YORK, April 28: "The Normal Heart" is about AIDS. Until it isn't.
Larry Kramer's historic play about the beginning of an epidemic that has killed millions can be seen as a time capsule of a period when the disease was first emerging. But it can also be a cautionary tale for any horror we have yet to fully grasp.
Joe Mantello and Ellen Barkin headline this excellent production, which opened Wednesday at the Golden Theatre and represents the play's Broadway debut, 26 years after it was first mounted at the Public Theater.
It starts in 1981 at a doctor's office in New York. A mysterious disease is making men sick and Ned Weeks (Mantello playing Kramer's raging alter ego) discusses it with Dr. Emma Brookner (Barkin).
"I think we're seeing only the tip of the iceberg," says the doctor. "I'm frightened nobody important is going to give a damn because it seems to be happening mostly to gay men."
That comment would prove prescient: The rest of the play is about how a group of gay men turned into activists as they grappled with a lethal disease whose method of transmission was unclear. In those early days, some advocates argued that homosexual men must stop having sex entirely.
"I've spent 15 years of my life fighting for our right to be free and make love whenever, wherever," one character cries. "You're telling me that all those years of what being gay stood for are wrong ... and I'm a murderer."
The play is very much the personal story of Weeks (and so of Kramer), the Cassandra who helped found the Gay Men's Health Crisis and bickered with colleagues about the best way to address the disease.
Mantello as Weeks is pugnacious ("We're not yelling loud enough!"), fights with his straight brother (a nice turn by Mark Harelik), who seems more concerned with building a $2 million house in Connecticut than backing his sibling, and tries to comfort his dying lover (a wonderful John Benjamin Hickey). Mantello manages to make his unlovable Weeks lovable and he steers clear of hagiography.
Joel Grey and George C. Wolfe co-direct and push the throttle — each scene is fraught with emotion, anger is quick to explode, papers are tossed with abandon, and any moment of humor is milked for the relief it offers from a hectic production.
There are wonderful soliloquies performed by Lee Pace, who tells the harrowing story of his character taking his dying lover home to Phoenix only for a petrified hospital staff to stuff the body in a Glad Bag, and by Barkin, whose polio-stricken doctor has a blistering exchange with a panel of government officials who decline to fund her work.
"Anyway you add all this up, it is an unconscionable delay and had never, never existed in any other health emergency during this entire century," she spits back. "We are enduring an epidemic of death."
This is not a lyrical or operatic play such as Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," which also dealt with AIDS and had its first major New York revival this season. Kramer is hardly subtle. He uses the play as a soapbox, attacking then-Mayor Ed Koch for apathy and The New York Times for not spreading the word about the plague.
It is in those moments that the work transcends the New York of the 1980s. Was this also what it was like for peace activists watching in horror as the massacres in Darfur or Bosnia were starting? "The Normal Heart" is an indictment of too-cold bureaucracies and less-than-eager politicians. It is also a window into debates the gay community has undertaken as they push for marriage rights — how far to push, how much to refer to their own sexuality, how strident they must be.
The production is wisely very spare, with only a few props used, perfectly in tune with the agitprop feel. Some of the actors not involved in scenes sit in chairs in the dark like silent witnesses, adding to the rawness of the staging.
One key exception is David Rockwell's marvelous raised collage that fills the stage's three walls. At first, it looks like nothing — just white cinderblocks. Upon closer inspection — and with help from the lighting team — the set reveals itself as hundreds of quotes, headlines and statistics about the AIDS crisis.
Since Kramer wrote this play, AIDS has become survivable for many people lucky enough to get new drugs. But there is no cure and people still needlessly die. So that is reason enough to return to 1981 and see — either for the first time or as a reminder — what those first days were like.
