The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me: Two Plays

by Kramer, Larry

  This time, and it was also a great gift, I had the opportunity to work with John Lee Beatty, who’d designed many of Marshall’s other productions. John Lee is another kind of theatrical genius, as obsessed with minute details as Eugene is off-the-cuff. Our set was a realistic, technical marvel, with the scenes from the past zipping in and out on clever winches. We even had a sink on stage, with running water, so that the doctors and nurses and orderlies who were constantly coming into the hospital environment could wash their hands, as they would in a real hospital.

  The elaborate apparatus for the medical treatment Ned is undergoing, as well as everything having to do with blood, was also worked out meticulously. I have not, in this published version, completely detailed all this medical minutiae, or the comings and goings of the nonspeaking hospital staff that the availability of a group of young Circle Rep interns allowed us to utilize in peopling our stage. Nor have I gone into too much detail about how the blood machinery looked and worked, beyond cursory descriptions.

  I guess what I’m saying, and hoping, is that a lot of inventive ways will be found to deal with any problems designing and producing my play might raise—that there is no right way, and that, as in all theater, imagination is also one of the actors, and there are many ways to play the part.

  A note about the songs Alexander sings to taunt his father in Act I: it is not essential that these be the particular songs, so long as the songs used are from this era, which is the end of World War II.

  There are, for instance, a great many other Andrews Sisters’ songs, available now on numerous CDs. I happen to be very fond of ‘Victory Polka,’ but it’s hard to locate the Time-Life Music CDs that contain the only recording I know of it (the second CD or fourth cassette of the album: ‘V-Disc, The Songs that Went to War, World War I Fiftieth Anniversary Collector’s Edition’).

  The South Pacific songs are available on both the original Broadway cast recording or the soundtrack album of the film. The songs from Show Boat (’Where’s the Mate For Me’ and ‘Make Believe’) as well as the brief exchange of dialogue are best represented on the complete EMI Show Boat (CD 7491082) or (my favourite) on the soundtrack from the MGM film, Till the Clouds Roll By (Sony CD AK 47029).

  Introduction

  I began arranging for the production of The Destiny of Me when I thought I was shortly going to die. It’s a play I’ve been working on for years—one of those “family” slash “memory” plays I suspect most playwrights feel compelled at some point to try their hand at in a feeble attempt, before it’s too late, to find out what their lives have been all about. I figured it would be the last words of this opinionated author.

  Not only did I think my play would be done while I was on my deathbed or after, I decided I would definitely leave word that it would not be done while my mother, who is now approaching ninety-three, was still alive. I certainly didn’t want to be around to discover how she would react to the portrayal, by her fifty-seven-year-old homosexual son, of some fifty years of her life.

  As destiny would have it, I appear to have received a respite from my expected imminent demise, at least one sufficient enough to ask myself: what have I gone and done?

  I call The Destiny of Me a companion play to the one I wrote in 1985, The Normal Heart, about the early years of AIDS. It’s about the same leading character, Ned Weeks, and the events of the earlier play have transpired before the curtain rises on the new one; it is not necessary, as they say, to have seen one to see the other. (The deathbed play remains to he written; now I have the chance to write a trilogy.)

  Oh, I’ve had to make a few little changes. Instead of facing death so closely, Ned Weeks now only fears it mightily. And the hospital where he’d gone to die is now the hospital where he goes to try to live a little longer.

  He still tries to figure out what his life’s been all about.

  This play now seems very naked to me. I’m overwhelmed with questions that didn’t bother me before. Why was it necessary for me to write it? Why do I want people to see it? What earthly use is served by washing so much of “the Weeks family” linen in public?

  When I wrote The Normal Heart, I had no such qualms. I knew exactly what I wanted to achieve and there was no amount of anything that could repress my hell-or-high-water determination to see that play produced, to hear my words screamed out in a theater, and to hope I’d change the world.

  In what possible way could The Destiny of Me ever change the world?

  About a dozen years ago I found myself talking to a little boy. I realized the little boy was me. And he was talking back. I was not only talking to myself but this myself was a completely different individual, with his own thoughts, defenses, and character, and a personality often most at odds with his grown-up self These conversations frightened me. It’s taken me years of psychoanalysis to rid myself of just such schizophrenic tendencies.

  I found myself talking to this kid more and more. I found myself writing little scenes between the two of us. I was in trouble. I was falling in love with this kid. I, who face a mirror—and the world—each day with difficulty, had found something, inside myself, to love. I found myself writing this kid’s journey—one that could only complete itself in death.

  I should point out that I have always hated anything that borders on the nonrealistic. I hate science fiction and horror movies. I do not want to see a play, be it by Herb Gardner or Neil Simon or Luigi Pirandello, in which one actor (the author) talks to himself as embodied in another actor. My life has always been too bound up in harsh realities to believe in such fantastic possibilities, theatrical or otherwise. Nor have I ever been one to write comfortably in styles not realistic, not filled with facts and figures and truth. (Some readers tell me my novel, Faggots, is about as surreal a portrayal of the gay world as could be, but it was all the real McCoy to me.)

  As I wrote on, in addition to worrying about my mother’s reaction, I began to taunt myself with other fears. There is only one Long Day’s Journey into Night. There is only one Death of a Salesman. And a million feeble attempts to duplicate their truth and to provoke their tears. And each playwright has only one family story to tell. And only one chance to tell it. Most, if they’re lucky, throw their feeble attempts in the waste basket or file them with the stuff they plan to bequeath to their alma mater or unload on the University of Texas.

  I further complicated my task by determining to write a personal history: a journey to acceptance of one’s own homosexuality. My generation has had special, if not unique, problems along this way. We were the generation psychoanalysts tried to change. This journey, from discovery through guilt to momentary joy and toward AIDS, has been my longest, most important journey, as important as—no, more important than my life with my parents, than my life as a writer, than my life as an activist. Indeed, my homosexuality, as unsatisfying as much of it was for so long, has been the single most important defining characteristic of my life.

  As I wrote of these journeys, and as we entered rehearsals, I found myself, over and over again, learning new things no amount of analysis had taught me. The father I’d hated became someone sad to me; and the mother I’d adored became a little less adorable, and no less sad. And although I’d set out, at the least, to have my day in court, actors, those magicians, grabbed hold of my words, and what had been my characters asserted themselves, and my harsh judgments were turned around in my face! My mother and father were showing me who they were, and not the other way around.

  Oh, why had I written this damn play anyway!

  I’d started out wanting to write a tragedy. I’d read all sorts of books that tried to define precisely what one is, including not a few that told me I couldn’t write one anymore. I think the lives that many gay men have been forced to lead, with AIDS awaiting them after the decades-long journey from self-hate, is the stuff of tragedy. And I’d thought that the marriage my parents had was tragic, too; they could have had much better lives without each other.

  But, once agai
n, I discovered some surprising things. My younger self was very funny and spunky, and it’s the me of today who, despite one hundred years of therapy, has lost resilience. As for my parents’ lives, well, there is a difference between tragedy and sadness. I cannot bring myself to see my father as Willy Loman. Nor my mother as Medea or Clytemnestra or Antigone or Phèdre. Or Mary Tyrone. Or Joan of Arc. The stakes (pun intended) just weren’t the same.

  So was my determination to see this play produced a desire for vengeance? For blame? For catharsis? Was it only hubris? (Anita Brookner enunciated many writers’ main motivation in the very title of one of her own books, Look at Me.)

  I discovered long ago that writing doesn’t bring catharsis. Writing The Normal Heart did not release my anger or make me hate Ed Koch and Ronald Reagan less or alter the present sorry state of the AIDS plague for the better. Writing Faggots did not find me true love or make me any more lovable or, so far as I can see, start any mass migration by the gay community to monogamous relationships. No, getting things off your chest doesn’t get them off for very long.

  Carole Rothman, the artistic director at Second Stage in New York, herself a parent, said she was uncomfortable about doing a play that “blamed” parents. (Joe Papp said he wouldn’t put on any play where a father hit a son. I always thought this said more about Joe than my play.) “Blame” began to be a word that haunted me. Did I blame my parents? Is this what my play was saying? Over and over I reread my words. I wasn’t blaming them. I was trying to understand what in their own lives made them the way they were and how this affected the lives of their children. I didn’t see this as blame or vengeance.

  In fact, I came to see their behavior as destined as my own. I even decided to change the play’s title, which had been The Furniture of Home (taken from the same W. H. Auden poem as The Normal Heart). I don’t know what sent me to Walt Whitman (beyond the desire to find my title in the words of another gay poet; I wonder now if it was as simple as one aging and physically deteriorating gay writer seeking inspiration from another), but I found myself reading and rereading his collected works. Sure enough, in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” that haunting ode to life without love, I found what I was looking for—”the destiny of me.”

  Now I had a play and I had a title and I had a director—Marshall Mason. Then my leading actors, Colleen Dewhurst and Brad Davis, died. I lost my next leading man, Ron Rifkin, because of an unfortunate disagreement I had with the playwright Jon Robin Baitz. Ron, for whom Robbie wrote his greatest role, in The Substance of Fire, bowed out. It would be some time before Tanya Berezin of the Circle Repertory Company would read my play in March 1991 and immediately accept it. Like me by the men in my life, my play had first to have its own history of rejections: by the Public Theater (both Joe Papp and JoAnne Akalaitis), Manhattan Theatre Club, Lincoln Center, Playwrights Horizons (both André Bishop and Don Scardino), American Place Theater, Second Stage, Long Wharf in New Haven, Hartford Stage, Yale Rep (both Lloyd Richards and Stan Wojewodski, Jr.), South Coast Rep in California, the Goodman and Steppenwolf in Chicago, and Circle in the Square on Broadway.

  I list these not to either tempt fate (oh, the nightmare possibility of those reviews that begin, “The numerous theaters that turned down Larry Kramer’s new play were wise indeed . . .”) or flaunt my rejections (The Normal Heart, Faggots, and my screenplay for Women in Love were originally turned down by even larger numbers), but to offer this thought to other writers, and to the little child inside that one talks to: almost more than talent you need tenacity, and an infinite capacity for rejection, if you are to succeed. I still don’t know where you get these, even after writing this play to try to find the answer.

  I guess that’s what my play’s about. I guess that’s what my life’s been about.

  Not much of a message, huh? Well, maybe it’s about a little more. I’ll have to wait and see. Each day my family surprises me more and more. And that little boy inside me.

  I’ll bet you didn’t expect Larry Kramer to talk like this.

  I set out to make sense of my life. And I found out that one’s life, particularly after one has written about it, doesn’t make sense. Life doesn’t make sense.

  But change does. And there is no change without tenacity. And change is usually very hard. With precious few gratifications along the way to encourage you to carry on. And some change is good. And necessary. And some change must not be allowed.

  This sounds more like Larry Kramer.

  Yes, I can make sense out of this.

  You may not agree, and you may not change your opinion, but you will have heard me make my case. And maybe, just maybe, you will think twice before slugging your kid tonight because he or she is gay, or you will not vote for any candidate who would allow AIDS to become a plague.

  Yes, I know the possibilities are slim.

  So what?

  The little boy in me still believes everything is possible.

  Mom, you taught me this.

  And you lied.

  But so does art and so does hope.

  This article originally appeared in the New York Times Arts & Leisure section on Sunday, October 4, 1992.

  O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me,

  O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you,

  Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,

  Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,

  Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there in the night,

  By the sea under the yellow and sagging moon,

  The messenger there arous’d, the fire, the sweet hell within,

  The unknown want, the destiny of me.

  From “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”

  Walt Whitman

  Act One

  (NED WEEKS, middle-aged, enters a hospital room with his suitcase.)

  NED: I grew up not far from here. The trees were just being chopped down. To make room for Eden Heights. That’s where we lived. That’s what they named places then.

  (HANNIMAN, a nurse, pushes in a cart with medical stuff on it, including NED’s records. She is black.)

  HANNIMAN: The eleventh floor is our floor—Infectious Diseases. We ask that you don’t leave this floor, or the hospital, or the Institute’s grounds, or indeed go to any other floor, where other illnesses are housed. Dr. Della Vida says it’s better to have you on our side. I tell him you’re never going to be on our side. You’re not here to cause some sort of political ruckus? Are you?

  NED: (Unpacking some books.) What better time and place to read The Magic Mountain?

  HANNIMAN: Are you?

  NED: I’m here for you to save my life. Is that too political?

  (DR. ANTHONY DELLA VIDA enters. He is short, dynamic, handsome, and very smooth, a consummate bureaucrat. He beams hugely and warmly embraces NED.)

  TONY: Hello, you monster!

  NED: I never understand why you talk to me . . .

  TONY: I’m very fond of you.

  NED: . . . after all I say about you.

  HANNIMAN: “Dr. Della Vida runs the biggest waste of taxpayers’ money after the Defense Department.” In the Washington Post.

  TONY: No, in the Washington Post he compared me to Hitler.

  HANNIMAN: No, that was in the Village Voice. And it was “you fucking son-of-a-bitch of a Hitler.”

  TONY: Where was it he accused me of pulling off the biggest case of scientific fraud since laetrile?

  NED: Vanity Fair.

  TONY: (Studying NED’s file.) All your numbers are going down pretty consistently. You didn’t listen to me when you should have.

  NED: Ah, Tony, nobody wants to take that shit.

  TONY: They’re wrong.

  NED: It doesn’t work.

  TONY: Nothing works for everybody.

  NED: Nobody believes you.

  TONY: Then why are you here?

  NED: I’m more desperate. And
you sold me a bill of goods.

  TONY: You begged me you were ready to try anything.

  NED: I asked you when you were going to strike gold with something. You’ve spent two billion dollars.

  TONY: No, sir! You asked me if I had anything I would take if I were you.

  NED: No, sir! You said to me, “I’ve got it.” And I said, “The cure!” And you said, “If you quote me I’ll deny it.” You slippery bastard.

  TONY: You’re the slippery bastard!

  HANNIMAN: Yep, he sure is on our side.

  NED: (Reading from a newspaper clipping.) “Dr. Della Vida has discovered a method to suppress the growth of the virus in mice by 80-90% . . .” The New York Times.

  TONY: For over a decade you have mercilessly condemned that newspaper’s coverage of this illness. Suddenly they’re your experts?

  NED: (Another clipping.) “. . . reconstituted genes will he introduced in transfusions of the patient’s own blood . . . cells given new genetic instructions, to self-destruct if they are infected.” The Lancet. (A third clipping.) “Conclusion: The success of this theory in in vitro experiments, followed by the successful inoculation of three West African sooty mangabey monkeys, leads one to hope that human experimentation can commence without further delay.” The New England Journal of Monkeys. I’ll be your monkey.

  HANNIMAN: Don’t say that. We have to guarantee each chimp a thirty-thousand-dollar retirement endowment. Their activists are better than your activists.

  TONY: How have you been feeling? (Starts examining NED.)

  NED: Okay physically. Emotionally shitty. We’ve lost.

  TONY: You are depressed. That’s too bad. You’ve been very useful.

  HANNIMAN: Useful?

  TONY: All your anger has kept us on our toes.