Larry Kramer is angry.
He’s angry at the straight world for treating gay men as pariahs. He’s angry at gay men for daring to remain closeted, and for continuing to risk their lives with casual sex in the midst of the AIDS crisis. He’s angry at the New York Times for failing to publicize the plague killing young New Yorkers when such publicity might stem the epidemic and buy needed time. And he’s angry at Mayor Koch (the play was first produced in 1985) for refusing to organize a governmental and medical response to the epidemic even as the casualties build to include friends, lovers, colleagues. Larry Kramer is furious and he wants everyone to know it.
And he’s right: we need this knowledge. About AIDS, the straight world’s indifference, the gay world’s self-concealment, the failure of political and journalistic leadership. Kramer’s play The Normal Heart is every bit as necessary for our self-understanding as was Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the anti-slavery generation, A Doll’s House for the feminist movement, or The Diary of Anne Frank for those striving to make sense of the Holocaust. In The Normal Heart, Kramer seeks to recruit every theatergoer to his nearly unlimited indignation, and our part is to buy a ticket and feel that indignation with him. The current freeFall Theatre production powerfully gives us that opportunity.
The story is set in the early 1980’s, and is about Ned Weeks (a thinly disguised Larry Kramer) and his discovery of the disease increasingly killing the men of gay New York City. Weeks is a loudmouth writer with a sharp temper, so no-one is too surprised when he begins to fulminate about the silence surrounding the spread of the new “gay plague.” He finds an ally in a doctor who has herself been crippled by polio, but his rich attorney brother won’t help him organize an activist group, and his most powerful gay friends are too scared for their jobs to publicly assist him. Nevertheless, Weeks puts together a coalition (modeled on the Kramer-constructed Gay Men’s Health Crisis), but it’s a closeted — and more diplomatic — friend who becomes president of the organization. As Weeks strives in vain to warn fellow gays that promiscuity can be deadly, as he tries to reach the major newspapers and gain a conference with a Mayor’s Assistant, we see the number of cases balloon and finally touch Weeks’ beloved partner, a fashion writer for the Times. Can the world really be silent while all these young men languish and die? President Reagan says nothing, Mayor Koch won’t stand up for New York citizens — does the world so hate gays that it wants to see them dead? Isn’t the AIDS crisis another Holocaust, greeted with the same obscene silence?
Eric Davis plays Weeks as a tactless, volatile, but deeply feeling polemicist who’s always on the edge of, or in the middle of, a bout of rage. Clearly, this is the wrong temperament when one is negotiating with the Mayor’s office — or showing one’s subtlety as an actor — but Davis’ Weeks doesn’t have a soft side, at least not for more than a few seconds. Either accusing or complaining, endangering his cause’s chances with his brashness or keeping that cause alive with his tirelessness, Davis as Weeks finally makes you wonder whether, in some cases at least, the top of one’s lungs is the only appropriate place to speak from. The cast around him shows more flexibility. Roxanne Fay is superb as the wheelchair-bound Dr. Emma Brookner, one of the few people to recognize the health crisis at its outset, and Jim Sorensen is impeccable as Weeks’ colleague Bruce Niles, who wins the leadership of the activist group because he’s capable of verbal delicacy. As Weeks’ friend and fellow traveler Mickey Marcus, Larry Alexander is splendid, and as Weeks’ lover Felix Turner, Justin Gordon exudes the sort of irony that Weeks clearly lost back in the womb. Other fine performances are turned in by Dick Baker, Mark Chandler, Robb Maus and, as a nerdish but powerful Mayor’s Assistant, Gavin Esham. Larry Silverberg’s direction emphasizes efficiency — even at two and three-quarter hours — and Scott Daniel’s costumes, like Jerid Fox’s minimalist set, are top-notch. Mike Wood’s lighting capably directs our attention to various playing areas on the wide stage.
The bottom line: this is a play that everyone should know. It ranks with Angels in America, if not in complexity, then in importance. Its power is rough, real, and, unfortunately, still relevant.
Don’t miss your chance to see it.
The Normal Heart runs through Feb. 16 at freeFall Theatre, 6099 Central Ave., St. Petersburg, 727-498-5205, 7 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. $29-$44, youth $20-$32. freefalltheatre.com.
