The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me: Two Plays (4 page)

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

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.

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.

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

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.