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by Larry Kramer, directed by Joel Greenberg

Studio 180, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto

October 16-November 6, 2011

“Normal is Outstanding”

The Normal Heart is a powerful, emotion-packed play that speaks as powerfully to audiences now as it did 25 years ago.  In 1985 when Larry Kramer’s autobiographical play premiered, it spoke so clearly to the AIDS crisis of its time that no one then could have foreseen that it would outlast it.  Yet, the recent award-winning revival of the play on Broadway and now the passionate revival by Studio 180 in Toronto prove that the work has a complexity and depth far beyond the one-issue play it was thought to be.  Its subject now seems to be no less that the forging of the modern gay identity through the crucible of suffering of the AIDS epidemic.  It also serves as a warning not to take present rights and freedoms for granted.  They can always be taken away again.

The action is set in New York City in the period 1981-84 when young gay men started dying of an unknown and as yet unnamed disease.  Kramer captures all too well the mystification among doctors and the paranoia in the gay community that a new disease should seemingly target previously healthy gay men.  Doctor Emma Brookner (Sarah Orenstein) has a theory that the disease is sexually transmitted and suggests to gay writer and journalist Ned Weeks (Jonathan Wilson), Kramer’s alter-ego, that he warn the gay community that their culture of promiscuity may be killing them.  The play’s first act details what makes this task nearly impossible for reasons both outside the gay community and within it.  Audiences, both gay and straight, will feel their anger rekindled to see how hospitals, lawyers, the city and the media chose to ignore the epidemic because it was thought to be only a “gay disease”.  AIDS revealed to the gay community depths of hatred toward gays that they had not thought possible, namely that those in authority were willing to do nothing about a fatal epidemic simply because its victims were gay.  To help in what was otherwise a municipal health crisis tainted anyone who helped, including the mayor, as pro-gay. 

What made the play so controversial when it first appeared is that Kramer also blames division within the gay community for the delays in treating the crisis seriously.  The small group that Weeks/Kramer is able to form is willing to organize care for sufferers but unwilling to call for abstinence as Dr. Brookner demands.  Coming only a decade after the Sexual Revolution when gay people felt free finally to engage in sex without guilt, many gay men had come to define themselves by their promiscuity in contrast to the ideal of heterosexual monogamy, however hypocritically practiced.  Ned Weeks is thus attacked verbally and physically for being anti-gay.  At the same time those who are wealthy or have good jobs--the very ones needed to raise funds and awareness--are unwilling to help for fear that coming out the closet would cost them their privileges.  Weeks, who like Kramer is also Jewish, sees a parallel in the world reaction to the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews.  Entrenched antisemitism delayed governments in helping Jews emigrate and divisions within the American Jewish community delayed plans of action.  Tendentious as this parallel is, it helps to reinforce the play’s much larger theme that rights for minority groups can always be rescinded and therefore must continually be fought for.      

Ultimately, only the mounting death toll at home, news of heterosexual transmission in Africa and successful research on the virus in France shames New York and the US in general into action.  By the end of 1983 the number of AIDS diagnoses reported in America had risen to 3,064 of whom 1,292 had died.

The Normal Heart is not merely a history lesson, important though that is for those with no direct experience of life in the last century.  The play is also a heart-breaking human drama.  Just as Kramer does not paint a simple portrait of good versus bad in the historical background, he gives us many-sided characters with strengths as well as flaws.  Chief among these is Kramer’s stand-in Ned.  He may be filled with righteous outrage but he also is a bad judge of when and where not to speak.  Though his focus impels his group forward, his abrasive style also causes it to lose key opportunities.  Jonathan Wilson is so perfect in the role you might have thought it was written for him.  He’s able to show how Ned’s anger is fuelled from many sources of frustration--political as well as personal. 

As Felix, the man patient enough to become Ned’s partner, Jeff Miller exudes the calm and good humour Ned needs in his life.  Miller’s depiction of Felix’s decline once he is stricken with the disease, especially his attempt to get his estate in order, is heart-rending. 

Ryan Kelly plays Mickey Marcus, a once confident man whose total meltdown in Act 2 when he just can’t handle the onslaught on bad news on all fronts is frighteningly convincing.  It becomes a lament for a paradise lost, never to be regained.  Paul Essiembre plays Bruce, a closeted bank vice-president, who makes understandable both the fear and the weakness behind his position.  John Bourgeois, though he looks nothing at all like Wilson, is Ned’s brother Ben, who finally must admit that prejudice still lingers beneath his surface tolerance.  Sarah Orenstein moves from dismay to rage as Dr. Brookner with no hope to offer her growing patient list and no funding to help her in her fight.  Kramer portrays her as a woman who contracted polio just before there was a vaccine, thus making her an image of a possible future of people living with HIV.  Jonathan Seinen makes a strong impression as Tommy, a man we at first disregard because of his effeminacy and Southern accent, but who turns out to be the one member of Ned’s group who never loses himself to anger.

Director Joel Greenberg has staged the play in the round that gives the action an increased immediacy besides creating the feeling that we are watching an arena where people are battling for our future.  Kimberley Purtell’s ever-exact lighting is essential in distinguishing the numerous changes of location and mood. 

The precision of the direction and the overwhelming intensity of the acting make this is a production that deserves the largest possible audience.  Gay people need to know the struggles that led to those freedoms they have and need to know that maintaining those freedoms requires constant vigilance.  They will be surprised to find gay marriage raised as an issue 25 years ago.  Straight people need to feel the kinds of pain any minority suffers when it is stigmatized and treated as less than equal.  Both groups should be outraged at how any public health crisis could be ignored for fear of political repercussions.   Both groups will be drawn into a great play that details with such compassion the personal toll exacted on anyone who fights for positive change against a system built to resist it.                              

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Sarah Orenstein and Jonathan Wilson. ©2011 John Karastamatis.

For tickets, visit www.buddiesinbadtimes.com.