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From the heart

A revival of 'The Normal Heart' prompts a look at the whole body of drama scripted by the AIDS epidemic, which has both devastated and re-engergized American theater

BY LINDA WINER | STAFF WRITER

April 18, 2004

'The Normal Heart" may be the angriest AIDS art ever. In it, Larry Kramer ferociously indicts the forces that kept the city, the country, the press and even the gay community from confronting a horrible, mysterious new disease. It had its premiere at the Public Theater 19 years ago Wednesday, when its first New York revival will open in the same hallowed building.

I remember admiring its fury, if not its writerly grace. I also remember wondering if, just maybe, Kramer was a little paranoid in his need to affix blame - and thereby, reason - to a nightmare.

Almost two decades later, it is clear that Kramer was a prophet, an awful but essential messenger who howled the alarm that - to humanity's disgrace - remains unheard today at the highest levels of world power. That first production was decorated with ever- changing statistics, including the latest total of AIDS cases worldwide. Kramer's published script mentions the shocking figure for Aug. 1, 1985: 12,062. The number on the Public's wall next week will be 70 million.

With all the loss, it would be a mistake to ignore the astonishing theater that has grown in the dark soil of cataclysm. We can almost put our arms around a definable body of AIDS dramatic literature that has energized the theater in the years between the first "Normal Heart" and this one.

"Biological horror"

Tony Kushner, in his foreword to "The Normal Heart" and its more intimate 1992 sequel, "The Destiny of Me," writes about the spreading epidemic as a "biological horror miserably allied to the world's murderous indifference, its masked and its naked hatred." This is, of course, an unacceptable price to pay for any re-engaged theater, including the profound pleasures of Kushner's AIDS masterwork, "Angels in America." Then again, no one was given a choice.

"The Normal Heart" was not New York's first major AIDS play. It missed that distinction by a month. In March 1985, Circle Repertory Theater opened "As Is," William Hoffman's sensitive drama about the impact of the disease on a deteriorating long-term relationship. "As Is," co-produced by a tiny gay theater called The Glines, transferred from the Village for a brief run on Broadway, where it was nominated for three Tony Awards. "The Normal Heart" ran longer than any play at the Public, and four years ago England's National Theatre named it one of the "100 Greatest Plays of the 20th Century."

Together, the contrasting works - one violently agitprop, one more conventional - may have been the first major pieces of AIDS art. Although Kramer had founded the Gay Men's Health Crisis in 1981, and more than 1,500 cases had been diagnosed in the United States by 1983, artists were slow to respond to the fear and death among them.

Arts journals were running death notices for the young. Dire whispers speculated about the depleting medical funds of performing-arts unions. Friends would phone and merely say the name of a dancer, a director, an actor. We didn't even have to ask the question: AIDS?

The community began responding through fund-raising benefits - especially after Rock Hudson's death gave AIDS a famous face in 1985 - but seldom through artistic content.

Artists and earlier plagues

I became obsessed back then with finding artists' responses to earlier epidemics, such as the anguished bodies in Mattia Preti's painting "Plague of 1656" or Daniel Defoe's startling report of ravaged 17th century London, "A Journal of the Plague Year." In "The Decameron," Boccaccio had imagined 100 tales by characters who fled to the countryside to escape the Florentine plague of 1348. Camus explored "The Plague" as existential terror 600 years later in a fictional French port in the 1940s, where "bacillus never dies or disappears for good."

Of course, all those Camilles and Violettas and Mimis with tuberculosis had coughed prettily in French literature and Italian opera, and Henrik Ibsen had written "Ghosts" to expose the social hypocrisy around syphilis. French writer George Sand and her friends were said to have been so terrified of the 1832 cholera epidemic in Paris that they met daily in the Luxembourg Gardens to make sure no one was missing.

During the early 1980s in New York, only the alternative papers carried cultural listings for works addressing the parallel universe that was filling up the obituary pages. Robert Chesley (dead of AIDS at 47 in 1990) wrote gut-wrenching plays called "Jerker" and "Night Sweats." For a while, the People With AIDS Theater Workshop performed a casual but heartfelt psychodrama called "AIDS Alive" on Tuesdays in the back room of the cabaret Don't Tell Mama. As in the Vietnam Veterans Ensemble Theater Company, the work was written and performed by veterans of an unpopular war.

Theater led the way

In fact, the theater was the first to grapple aloud with what was still being called the "gay plague." In much the same way, the theater had been the first to tackle ambivalence about Vietnam with "Hair" at Joseph Papp's Public in 1967, followed by David Rabe's Vietnam trilogy ("The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel," "Sticks and Bones" and "Streamers").

Visual artists were the second to respond. The dance world, already struggling against cliches about guys in tights, was slower to identify publicly with the decimation of its ranks.

TV had the occasional human-interest drama, notably "An Early Frost," starring Gena Rowlands, in 1985, and Terrence McNally's "Andre's Mother" in 1990. But most of the tearjerkers focused on children or heterosexuals. Movies might have the odd reference to condoms in sex comedies, and Steve Buscemi did star in a fine, small film called "Parting Glances" in 1986. Until Tom Hanks played a dying gay lawyer in 1993's "Philadelphia," however, AIDS was too deep a downer to be mentioned in a major motion picture.

By 1987, the theater was out there holding a forum about its role in AIDS prevention. At a crowded meeting called "Epidemic: Center Stage," playwrights and other experts debated their obligation to educate audiences through their work. Kramer, who said he had been accused of being a "message queen" when he wrote "The Normal Heart," exhorted the crowd to "call yourself artists less and message queens more." Hoffman disagreed, arguing, "In serious times, we need both serious and frivolous art to feed our spirit." I am still haunted by Chesley's remark: "If I don't deal with AIDS, I would have to write history plays."

Transcending the grim