COMPASSION PLAY
Forgetting the ineptitude of Larry Kramer’s 1988 farce Just Say No, it’s ripe to revive his 1985 masterwork about how a health crisis defined the gay community–as much by what it didn’t do as how it rose to the occasion. Unlike Just Say No ‘s driven attack on Nancy Reagan and the abstinence nags, this memoir of the early days of the AIDS crisis–and Kramer’s pivotal role as a firebrand crusader–refuses to become dated. Rooted in the well-earned crises of believable characters, it’s a constant call to arms against government apathy and an antidote to the self-doubt of reluctant reformers.
In 160 minutes The Normal Heart poses an enduring question about the gay community: Can a vertical minority that cuts through all races, nations, sexes, religions and classes be united by something as divisive as sex? Even more perilously, can the immediate power of sex outweigh the long-term fear of death? For many ignorant/innocent homosexuals between July 1981 and May 1984 (the action of the drama), it did. And, of course, in 1981 it’s still 14 years before the “triple cocktail” of retroviral treatments that would stabilize but not cure HIV.
The Normal Heart takes its title from a poem by gay poet W. H. Auden that contrasts loneliness with longing and ends with “We must love one another or die.” But for Kramer in 1981 that line is now perverted into “love one another and die.” Still enraging after 28 years, Kramer’s you-are-there chronicle of the early years of the AIDS epidemic shows how the paltry efforts of medical and municipal authorities forced the sometimes panic-peddling author and other gay activists to found the Gay Men’s Health Crisis to fight for research and prevention.
Almost inevitably, Kramer’s vitriolic grandstanding and toxic scolding compelled his own crusaders (many of them closet cases afraid for their jobs) to expel their loudest knight, who went on to start ACT UP as a far more radical enterprise. Identity politics collided with the greater good of safer sex. Kramer’s surrogate Ned Weeks is left with only the vain hope that his lover’s death–so powerfully delivered here that it instantly unleashes searing memories and survivor guilt–may be among the last ones. (We know better: The current count is an unbelievable 35+ million casualties.)
Every return to this agitprop masterwork is a communal effort, an outpouring as much as a production. TimeLine Theatre Company’s revival at Stage 773 is anchored in a kinetic performance by theater wizard David Cromer. His implacable portrayal gives every supposedly dated development the present-tense immediacy of breaking news.
Past is future and the emergency is far from over, as Nick Bowling’s urgent staging works overtime to convey. Unlike previous productions where the actors cover the walls with chalkboard statistical updates and warnings about gays returning to unsafe sex, here video panels capture the protests of a generation ago, contrasting the political with the replicating virus at its uncaring worst. Brian Sidney Bembridge’s backdrop of 5,000 books recalls Ned’s cluttered but cultured apartment where if blood isn’t spilled, milk in a particularly dramatic scene certainly is.
As always, Kramer’s surrogate roots his firsthand story in the turbulence of a time when sexual freedom or anonymous copulations gave an opportunistic virus the perfect host: Kramer’s attack on the bars and bathhouses made him an instant pariah. Adding to the burden of Ned’s jeremiads against Mayor Koch, Ronald Reagan and his own Gay Men’s Health Crisis, is his private ordeal with an initially hostile brother (the wonderful Marc Grapey), and a lover stricken with AIDS (supple Patrick Andrews) whose despair and deterioration speaks for every panel in the AIDS Quilt.
Notwithstanding our distance from those days of weekly obituaries of suddenly, permanently “disappeared” friends and acquaintances, the play smolders when it doesn’t ignite. In a role that needn’t be charismatic, just adamant, Cromer’s Ned takes no prisoners and offers no quarter. Happily, there’s enough of the un-detonating Ned to keep him vulnerable as much as polemical. Never skittish in the strident scenes with so much dialectic china smashed by bullish Ned, Cromer roots Ned in a contagious neediness and bedrock decency that explains and excuses his excesses. Obnoxious, intransigent and utterly uncompromising, a necessarily nasty Ned agonizes over how the cumulative gay legacy (from Socrates to Proust), inseparable from Western civilization, can be so easily overwhelmed by a virus.
As Ned’s lover Felix, a New York Times fashion columnist unsuited to agitation, Andrews reaches proper pathos as the stricken journalist, his shaky, warbling voice speaking for and from a broken body (although sometimes he is exasperatingly hard to make out). Andrews also conveys the panic of embattled innocence of an unconditional lover; imagine a collective “Why me?” far vaster than the Quilt’s appearance on the Mall in D.C.
Despite the lack of a German accent, Mary Beth Fisher’s Dr. Emma Brookner (based on polio-stricken Dr. Linda Laubenstein) trenchantly conveys the frustrations endured by the front-line doctors. Stephen Rader is powerful as Mickey, an AIDS activist overtaken by “bereavement overload” and compassion fatigue. Fortunately, this production, although rife with fatiguing subject matter, astounds with its compassion.
photos by Lara Goetsch
The Normal Heart
TimeLine Theatre Company at Stage 773
scheduled to end on Dec. 22, 2013
EXTENDED to December 29, 2013
for tickets call 773-281-8463 or visit timelinetheatre.com
for info on this and other Chicago Theater, visit http://www.TheatreinChicago.com
