War Wages on in The Normal Heart

By Jonathan Jones

Sunday, May 01, 2011

In June 2004, I attended the revival of The Normal Heart at the Public Theatre, directed by David Esbjornson and featuring Raúl Esparza as Ned Weeks. Nineteen years after its premier, the work was new to me though much of the subject matter had been covered in a number of my undergraduate courses. Given that the play is largely a lesson in history, much is required of the actors in order to give life to the characters. This is not a play about people. This is not a play about plot. This is a play that insists audiences wake up to what they have turned a blind eye to before. It condemns the players, whom are minimally masked in this autobiographical work. And this is a play that allows playwright Larry Kramer an opportunity to do what he felt at that time he had not yet been successful at doing—fighting as hard as he can—a fight that is still being waged with expert vigor and heart at the Golden Theater.

Twenty-six years have come and gone since the debut of the work, yet the audience sits in rapture as though they’ve never heard these words before. Perhaps they haven’t. This cannot be guaranteed, and as such, it was pivotal for Joel Gray and George C. Wolfe to push the work further. Not having seen the original production (I was six after all), I can’t entirely be sure what is old and what is new. What I do know to be new since my experience in 2004 is the direction of the heart of most speeches to the audience rather than between the characters. We in the audience are schooled in the history of the AIDS epidemic and creation of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. We are schooled in the apathy of the political leaders. We are schooled in the divisions within the gay community unsure of how to face the reality that they are unknowingly killing themselves. When the characters get angry, they want us to be angry with them. Thus, Gray and Wolfe smartly decorate the stage with actors who are not in the most confrontational of scenes so that we can understand that the real focus of the anger is not at the character it’s being directed to at a given moment, but rather to every character who is not giving their all to fight this fight. By extension, we in the audience as part of this New York, albeit twenty-six years removed—we too are implicated. Ellen Barkin’s Dr. Emma Brookner yells at the audience for nearly five minutes, trying to deal with the frustration of the National Institutes of Health’s refusal to fund her preliminary research into the cause of what would become known as HIV. We were not angry then, and we are not angry now—and the gravity of this piece is to implore us to finally get angry.

At the close of the first act, in the most intimate of scenes between Ned and his lover Felix, the cast is assembled onstage watching, as if to say that we all must be privy to these private moments as they are the truth behind what we are fighting for. Felix removes his sock and reveals his first tell-tale lesion on his foot. He says to Ned, “It keeps getting bigger and bigger, Neddie, and it doesn’t go away.” At this moment, the second of three scrawls of the growing list of names of those who have died from AIDS is projected in a crawl along the up-stage wall. It began as a few short columns,  grew to a list that encompassed the entire wall, and finally, in a moment that just knocks the wind out of you, it encapsulated the entire proscenium by the night’s end. Masterful imagery; masterful direction; impeccable acting. The Normal Heart fights on.

The Normal Heart is currently playing a limited run at the John Golden Theater through July, 2011. Tickets are available through telecharge.