The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me: Two Plays
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Kramer is telling us we must save ourselves. He is forcefully reminding us that being the object of hatred for millennia will make any subject hate her- or himself. He is demanding that, as we liberate ourselves, we also tranform what we are liberating, that we rid ourselves of self-hatred and begin the riddance by naming it. But he has never through all this hectoring lost sight of the fact that we are more hated than self-hating, that we are in a fight with an enemy whose implacable detestation of us is the true nemesis against which our battles are waged. The two plays collected here are magnificent examples of this understanding, which by virtue of its historicity, its complexity, its realism, is unmistakably progressive.
We’ll go down if we don’t stand up for ourselves.
Surely you see that.
If Larry Kramer makes you angry, he also has a rich claim on your forgiveness. Read these plays.
4.
The Washington Weekses, like the New England Tyrones, and their nearly coeval Brooklyn equivalents the Lomans, are “fog people”; you can tell by the way they talk. Their eloquence is all in the hesitations, in the tumult. They are most patently American in this, that they betray in every word and gesture how densely the fog surrounds them, how nearly impossible it is to move forward. Doubts, confusions, night sweats, real darkness: a fog has hovered about and haunted every moment of American history, potential doom obscuring potential illumination. The fog pours in to engulf any great work, any new beginning, any attempt to overturn and start anew, any voyage past what is known. Progress is unimaginably difficult, dangerous, always at risk, always made by people with only partial vision. American actors, historical, familial, political, theatrical, move blindly ahead toward a future that never is, and never can be, clear. The great error has been to mistake the darkness for damnation, to surrender to immobility or worse, to try to retrace our steps backward to a safety that has ceased to exist or never existed. It is nearly impossible to move forward. And yet move forward is precisely what the courageous among the fog people do.
Here is an American epic, a wandering without a homecoming. We haven’t aged sufficiently as a community, or as a nation, even to imagine what the homecoming will be like. The doom that haunts every American epic is here made manifest in a plague, which has now grown to globally holocaustal dimensions: fifty million infected, sixteen million dead, ten percent increases in new infections every year. And still there is no cure, still there is mendacity and calumny and malign neglect and hatred for the Other—gay, female, black, brown, yellow, non-American, poor. And still there are the epic virtues, still there is astonishing courage, generosity, nobility and heroism, still the grand battles to change the world and the order of things, still the refusal to accept inujustice, blind destiny, even fate. This doom and these virtues are given full-blooded stage life in The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me. Together the plays constitute an American epic, improbably and perhaps accidentally of the theater. Their vision is individual and deeply communal. It is tragic and unceasingly generative. Its characters are possessed of a stammering eloquence, and what they speak is uncomfortable, outrageous, abrasive, brave: the truth. These plays give the lie to a theater of diminished expectations and humbled ambitions. Here is theater that has managed to matter, the work of a deep-diving heart as hot as the sun.
—Tony Kushner
New York City
June 2000
The Normal Heart
For Norman J. Levy,
who succeeded where all others failed.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
From “September 1, 1939”
W. H. Auden
Acknowledgments
Theater is an especially collaborative endeavor. Many people help to make a play.
I would like to thank: Arthur Kramer (as always), A.J. Antoon, Ann and Don Brown, Michael Callen, Michael Carlisle, Joseph Chaikin, Kate Costello, Dr. James D’Eramo, Helen Eisenbach, Dr. Roger Enlow, Tom Erhardt, Robert Ferro, Emmett Foster, Jim Fouratt, Sanford Friedman, Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien, Dr. Patrick Hennessey, Richard Howard, Jane Isay, Dr. Richard Isay, Chuck Jones, Owen Laster, Dr. Frank Lilly, Joan and David Maxwell, Rodger McFarlane, Patrick Merla, Hermine and Maurice Nessen, Mike Nichols, Nick Olcott, Charles Ortleb, Johnnie Planco, Judy Prince, Margaret Ramsay, Mary Anne and Douglas Schwalbe, Will Schwalbe, Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, and Tim Westmoreland.
I particularly thank my intelligent cast, and our director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, a humble, gentle man of great patience and courage.
I give special thanks and tribute to Dr. Linda J. Laubenstein.
I am grateful to the following works of scholarship: “American Jewry During the Holocaust,” a report edited by Seymour Maxwell Finger for the American Jewish Commission on the Holocaust, Hon. Arthur J. Goldberg, Chairman, March 1984 (the excerpt quoted herein is used by permission); Israel in the Mind of America by Peter Grose, Alfred A. Knopf, 1983; American Jewry’s Public Response to the Holocaust, 1938-44: An Examination Based upon Accounts in the Jewish Press and Periodical Literature, A Doctoral Dissertation by Haskel Lookstein, Yeshiva University, January 1979, University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan; While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy, by Arthur D. Morse, copyright © 1967, The Overlook Press, Woodstock, New York, 1983; The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945, by David S. Wyman, Pantheon Books, 1984.
For encouraging, challenging, inspiring, and teaching me—for caring—I am exceptionally indebted to Gail Merrifield, the Director of Plays at the New York Shakespeare Festival, as I am to this remarkable organization’s Literary Manager, Bill Hart.
Indeed, there is not a person at the New York Shakespeare Festival to whom I cannot say, Thank you.
There are no words splendid enough to contain and convey what Joseph Papp has meant to me, and to this play.
There are many people who lived this play, who lived these years, and who live no more. I miss them.
—Larry Kramer
The original New York production of The Normal Heart opened on April 21, 1985 at the Public Theater in New York City, New York; a New York Shakespeare Festival Production, it was produced by Joseph Papp. It had the following cast:
Cast of Characters
(in order of appearance)
Craig Donner Michael Santoro
Mickey Marcus Robert Dorfman
Ned Weeks Brad Davis
David Lawrence Lott
Dr. Emma Brookner Concetta Tomei
Bruce Niles David Allen Brooks
Felix Turner D. W. Moffett
Ben Weeks Phillip Richard Allen
Tommy Boatwright William DeAcutis
Hiram Keebler Lawrence Lott
Grady Micbael Santoro
Examining Doctor Lawrence Lott
Orderly Lawrence Lott
Orderly Michael Santoro
Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg
Scenery Eugene Lee and Keith Raywood
Lighting Natasha Katz
Costumes Bill Walker
Associate Producer Jason Steven Cohen
The action of this play takes place between July 1981 and
May 1984
in New York City.
Scenes and Approximate Dates
About the Production
The New York Shakespeare Festival production at the Public Theater was conceived as exceptionally simple. Little furniture was used: a few wooden office chairs, a desk, a table, a sofa, and an old battered hospital gurney that found service as an examining table, a bench in City Hall, and a place for coats in the organization’s old office. As the furniture found itself doing double-duty in different scenes, so did the doorways built into the set’s back wall. In many instances, the actors used the theater itself for entrances and exits.
The walls of the set, made of construction-site plywood, were whitewashed. Everywhere possible, on this set and upon the theater walls too, facts and figures and names were painted, in black, simple lettering.
Here are some of the things we painted on our walls:
1. Principal place was given to the latest total number of AIDS cases nationally:____________AND COUNTING. (For example, on August 1, 1985, the figure read 12,062.)
As the Centers for Disease Control revise all figures regularly, so did we, crossing out old numbers and placing the new figure just beneath it.
2. This was also done for states and major cities.
3. EPIDEMIC OFFICIALLY DECLARED JUNE 5, 1981.
4. MAYOR KOCH: $75,000—MAYOR FEINSTEIN: $16,000,000. (For public education and community services.)
5. “TWO MILLION AMERICANS ARE INFECTED—ALMOST 10 TIMES THE OFFICIAL ESTIMATES”—Dr. Robert Gallo, London Observer, April 7, 1985.
6. The number of cases in children.
7. The number of cases in gays and the number of cases in straights, calculated by subtracting the gay and bisexual number from the total CDC figure.
8. The total number of articles on the epidemic written by the following newspapers during the first ten months of 1984:
The San Francisco Chronicle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .163
The New York Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41
The Los Angeles Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .37
The Washington Post . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .24
9. During the first nineteen months of the epidemic, the New York Times wrote about it a total of seven times:
1. July 3, 1981, page 20 (41 cases reported by CDC)
2. August 29, 1981, page 9 (107 cases)
3. May 11, 1982, Section III, page 1 (335 cases)
4. June 18, 1982, Section II, page 8 (approximately 430 cases)
5. August 8, 1982, page 31 (505 cases)
6. January 6, 1983, Section II, page 17 (approximately 891 cases)
7. February 6, 1983, Magazine (the “Craig Claiborne” article) (958 cases)
10. During the three months of the Tylenol scare in 1982, the New York Times wrote about it a total of 54 times:
October 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31
November 2, 5, 6, 9, 12, 17, 21, 22, 25
December 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 10, 14, 15, 19, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30
Four of these articles appeared on the front page.
Total number of cases: 7.
11. Government research at the National Institutes of Health did not commence in reality until January 1983, eighteen months after the same government had declared the epidemic.
12. One entire wall contained this passage:
“There were two alternative strategies a Jewish organization could adopt to get the American government to initiate action on behalf of the imperiled Jews of Europe. It could cooperate with the government officials, quietly trying to convince them that rescue of Jews should be one of the objectives of the war, or it could try to pressure the government into initiating rescue by using embarrassing public attention and rallying public opinion to that end.
The American Jewish Committee chose the former strategy and clung to it tenaciously.
From the very onset of Jewish crises, the Committee responded to each new Nazi outrage by practicing their traditional style of discreet ‘backstairs’ diplomacy.
With each worsening event, the Committee reacted by contacting yet another official or re-visiting the same ones to call their attention to the new situation.
The Jewish delegates were usually politely informed that the matter was being given the ‘most earnest attention.’
They were still trying to persuade the same officials when the war ended.”
From “American Jewry During the Holocaust,” Prepared for the American Jewish Commission on the Holocaust, 1984, Edited by Seymour Maxwell Finger
13. Announcement of the discovery of “the virus” in France: January 1983.
Announcement of the “discovery” of “the virus” in Washington: April 1984.
14. The public education budget for 1985 at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: $120,000.
15. Vast expanses of wall were covered with lists of names, much like the names one might find on a war memorial, such as the Vietnam Memorial in Washington.
Foreword
Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart is a play in the great tradition of Western drama. In taking a burning social issue and holding it up to public and private scrutiny so that it reverberates with the social and personal implications of that issue, The Normal Heart reveals its origins in the theater of Sophocles, Euripides, and Shakespeare. In his moralistic fervor, Larry Kramer is a first cousin to nineteenth-century Ibsen and twentieth-century Odets and other radical writers of the 1930s. Yet, at the heart of The Normal Heart, the element that gives this powerful political play its essence, is love—love holding firm under fire, put to the ultimate test, facing and overcoming our greatest fear: death.
I love the ardor of this play, its howling, its terror and its kindness. It makes me very proud to be its producer and caretaker.
—Joseph Papp
Act One
Scene 1
The office of DR. EMMA BROOKNER. Three men are in the waiting area:
CRAIG DONNER, MICKEY MARCUS, and NED WEEKS.
CRAIG: (After a long moment of silence.) I know something’s wrong.
MICKEY: There’s nothing wrong. When you’re finished we’ll go buy you something nice. What would you like?
CRAIG: We’ll go somewhere nice to eat, okay? Did you see that guy in there’s spots?
MICKEY: You don’t have those. Do you?
CRAIG: No.
MICKEY: Then you don’t have anything to worry about.
CRAIG: She said they can be inside you, too.
MICKEY: They’re not inside you.
CRAIG: They’re inside me.
MICKEY: Will you stop! Why are you convinced you’re sick?
CRAIG: Where’s Bruce? He’s supposed to be here. I’m so lucky to have such a wonderful lover. I love Bruce so much, Mickey. I know something’s wrong.
MICKEY: Craig, all you’ve come for is some test results. Now stop being such a hypochondriac.
CRAIG: I’m tired all the time. I wake up in swimming pools of sweat. Last time she felt me and said I was swollen. I’m all swollen, like something ready to explode. Thank you for coming with me, you’re a good friend. Excuse me for being such a mess, Ned. I get freaked out when I don’t feel well.
MICKEY: Everybody does.
(DAVID comes out of EMMA’s office. There are highly visible purple lesions on his face. He wears a long-sleeved shirt. He goes to get his jacket, which he’s left on one of the chairs.)
DAVID: Whoever’s next can go in.
CRAIG: Wish me luck.
MICKEY: (Hugging CRAIG.) Good luck.
(CRAIG hugs him, then NED, and goes into EMMA’s office.)
DAVID: They keep getting bigger and bigger and they don’t go away. (ToNED.) I sold you a ceramic pig once at Maison France on Bleecker Street. My name is David.
NED: Yes,
I remember. Somebody I was friends with then collects pigs and you had the biggest pig I’d ever seen outside of a real pig.
DAVID: I’m her twenty-eighth case and sixteen of them are dead. (He leaves.)
NED: Mickey, what the fuck is going on?
MICKEY: I don’t know. Are you here to write about this?
NED: I don’t know. What’s wrong with that?
MICKEY: Nothing, I guess.
NED: What about you? What are you going to say? You’re the one with the health column.
MICKEY: Well, I’ll certainly write about it in the Native, but I’m afraid to put it in the stuff I write at work.
NED: What are you afraid of?
MICKEY: The city doesn’t exactly show a burning interest in gay health. But at least I’ve still got my job: the Health Department has had a lot of cutbacks.
NED: How’s John?
MICKEY: John? John who?
NED: You’ve had so many I never remember their last names.
MICKEY: Oh, you mean John. I’m with Gregory now. Gregory O’Connor.
NED: The old gay activist?
MICKEY: Old? He’s younger than you are. I’ve been with Gregory for ten months now.
NED: Mickey, that’s very nice.
MICKEY: He’s not even Jewish. But don’t tell my rabbi.
CRAIG: (Coming out of EMMA’s office.) I’m going to die. That’s the bottom line of what she’s telling me. I’m so scared. I have to go home and get my things and come right back and check in. Mickey, please come with me. I hate hospitals. I’m going to die. Where’s Bruce? I want Bruce.
(MICKEY and CRAIG leave. DR. EMMA BROOKNER comes in from her office. She is in a motorized wheelchair. She is in her mid-to-late thirties.)
EMMA: Who are you?
NED: I’m Ned Weeks. I spoke with you on the phone after the Times article.