The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me: Two Plays Read online

  “Since his screenplay for D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love in 1969, Larry Kramer has been a prophet of psychic health and catastrophe among us—a prophet unmatched for the accuracy of his omens and the reliability of his anathemas and remedies. His uncannily foresighted novel Faggots appeared in 1978 just as the AIDS virus flooded whole wings of the American bloodstream; now its Swiftian portrait of an all but vanished subculture stands as that culture’s visible memorial. His later plays have been clear as firebells, memorable as tracer bullets.”—The American Academy of Arts and Letters citation, May 1996

  Praise for The Normal Heart

  “The blood that’s coursing through The Normal Heart is boiling hot. There can be little doubt that it is the most outspoken play around.”—Frank Rich, The New York Times

  “Kramer’s astounding drama about AIDS is too urgent to ignore! An astounding drama. . . a damning indictment of a nation in the middle of an epidemic with its head in the sand. It will make your hair stand on end even as the tears spurt from your eyes. Dynamite!”—Liz Smith, New York Daily News

  “Wired with anger, electric with rage. . . Powerful stuff.”—The Boston Globe

  “No one who cares about the future of the human race can afford to miss The Normal Heart.”—Rex Reed

  “The Normal Hearthas broken a great silence. . . . It has put politics and journalism to shame for the cover-up of a major disaster and one of the great moral dramas of our time.”—Frances FitzGerald, author of Fire in the Lake

  “Impassioned writing . . . explosively powerful. . . uniquely important.” —The Advocate

  “I haven’t been this involved—upset—in too damn long. Kramer honors us with this stormy, articulate theatrical work.”—Harold Prince

  “Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart is arguably the best political play of that schizophrenic decade and definitely the definitive dramatic exploration of the early years of the AIDS crisis.”—Chicago Tribune

  “Larry Kramer’s 1988 masterwork refuses to date.”—Chicago Reader

  “Kramer’s play actually may work better now in the tragic hindsight of history.”—Chicago Sun-Times.

  Praise for The Destiny of Me

  “Searing!”—Vanity Fair

  “Gives new hope to the American theater. One of the year’s ten best. . . Poignant, most moving, enriching.”—Time

  “Overwhelmingly powerful. . . scaldingly honest. . . a seismic jolt of visceral theatricality!”—Frank Rich, The New York Times

  “A harrowing, emotionally naked family-memory-AIDS play, playful and moving, personable and disturbing, with scenes of devastating counterpoint. The work of a theater artist. . . like Arthur Miller at his best.”—Newsday

  “Driven by a fierce honesty and searing pain, Kramer’s emotional and moral urgency fills The Destiny of Me with irresistible human truth.”—Newsweek

  “A mature work by a gifted American playwright in his prime . . . bitter and angry and full of biting humor.”—The Wall Street Journal

  “The Destiny of Me is bigger than any one of us. The Long Day’s Journey comparisons are apt. At long last Kramer the activist has leashed in Kramer the polemicist, letting loose Kramer the artist.”—QW

  “The Destiny of Me is a beautiful, somber play, very mature, and very personal. Plays are meant for presentation. Great plays also stand well as great literature. This is one of them. Kramer proves once again his place as one of the best writers of our times.”—Lambda Book Report

  The Normal Heart

  and

  The Destiny of Me

  By Larry Kramer

  Fiction

  Faggots

  Plays

  Sissies’ Scrapbook

  The Normal Heart

  Just Say No

  The Destiny of Me

  Screenplay

  Women in Love

  Nonfiction

  Reports from the holocaust: the story of an AIDS activist

  The Normal Heart

  and

  The Destiny of Me

  Two plays by Larry Kramer

  With a Foreword by Tony Kushner

  This collection copyright © 2000 by Larry Kramer

  Introduction copyright © 2000 by Tony Kushner

  The Normal Heart copyright ©1985 by Larry Kramer

  The Destiny of Me copyright © 1993 by Larry Kramer

  Foreword to The Normal Heart copyright © 1985 by Joseph Papp

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me are subject to a royalty. They are fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and all British Commonwealth countries, and all countries covered by the International Copyright Union, the Pan-American Copyright Convention, and the Universal Copyright Convention. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound taping, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying, and rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved.

  All inquiries concerning English language stock and amateur applications to perform them, must be made in advance, before rehearsals begin, with Samuel French, 45 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10010. First-class professional applications for permission to perform them, and those other rights stated above, for all plays in this volume must be made in advance to Tom Erhardt, Casarotto Ramsay, National House, 36 Queen Anne’s Gate, London SW1H 9AS.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  The credits appearing on page 253 constitute an extension of the copyright page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kramer, Larry.

  The normal heart; and, The destiny of me / Larry Kramer.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-10: 0-8021-3692-3

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-3692-3

  1. AIDS (Disease)—Patients—Drama. 2. Gay men—Drama. I. Title: Normal heart; and, The destiny of me. II. Kramer, Larry. Destiny of me. III. Title: Destiny of me. IV. Title.

  PS3561.R252 N6 2000

  812’.54—dc 2100-024177

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  06 07 08 09 10 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  Foreword

  The Normal Heart

  The Destiny of Me

  Foreword

  1.

  Here are two plays that, taken together, offer a persuasive account of a critical, terrible era when an emergent community, laboring to set itself free from centuries of persecution and oppression, was blindsided just at the moment of a political and cultural attainment of some of its most important goals by a biological horror miserably allied to the world’s murderous indifference, its masked and its naked hatred. From the time of their first theatrical productions, every concerned, engaged person has ha
d to address, to laud or deplore, to argue and contend with, Larry Kramer’s portrayal of the period. The plays are now part of our history, beyond forgetting.

  Kramer, not understanding that theater had ceased to be newsworthy, wrote a play that made news, made a difference, had an effect—not to win prizes or encomia in the press, nor to set the box office ablaze, but to catalyze his society, which we all know theater can’t do anymore, except on the rare occasions when it does, as when Larry Kramer wrote The Normal Heart.

  The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me need no introduction because they are accessible to any reader. You don’t need permission; don’t even knock, just enter. You will know immediately that you have been awaited impatiently; you will know immediately where you are and how to proceed. Guides aren’t necessary. The plays are shockingly, uncomfortably, almost embarrassingly direct. They contain hidden depths and complexities, to be sure, but in both plays beats one great heart aflame with one grand overwhelming desire: to use dramatic literature and the stage to get at truth, at a truth, at one truth of these times—and not a metaphysical truth, not an abstracted principle of existence (though these are, in the process, uncovered), but rather truth as Marx understood it, truth that springs from and returns to action, truth engaged with practice, praxis, truth that is shaped by and shapes lived experience, truth that is changed by and changes the world.

  The ardency of Kramer’s longing for truth is most evident in the language he employs, which is startlingly plain. Although the plays’ titles are found in lines of verse by two great poets, W. H. Auden and Walt Whitman, these dramas are remarkably non-poetical, almost antipoetical. Each text has precisely one, and only one symbolic, metaphoric moment which gains much of its power from its absolute isolation. Both moments—the spilled milk in The Normal Heart, the spilled blood in The Destiny of Me—are actions, stage images; neither is a figure of speech, of language. The writing avoids metaphor, avoids all painterliness. It is governed by a stark, unyielding economy, pressed by a urgent need to find answers and understanding—as pressed by need as the playwright, his protagonist, and the community to which they belong, for which they feel such love and such anger, are pressed to find a cure for AIDS.

  The poem that concludes the English-language edition of Bertolt Brecht’s Collected Poems, “And I Always Thought,” could serve as a credo for Kramer’s playwriting:

  And I always thought: the very simplest words

  Must be enough. When I say what things are like

  Everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds.

  That you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for yourself

  Surely you see that.

  As in Kramer, so too in much of Brecht: the few instances of metaphor in the writing ring like perfectly cast bells (usually of alarm), precisely because of their scarcity. The ear of the listener, having been opened by the playwright to the logic and rhythms of exigent, functional speech, the speech of crisis, emergency, danger, receives metaphor as an exceptional occurrence, avidly, with heightened attention. This is the way classical writers, the best Greeks and Romans, Aeschylus and Horace, use metaphor: sparingly, with severe discipline. It is a canny technique, but it is much more than a technique. This precision and harshness is the soul of an art that seeks truth through clarity of vision, an art that rejects comfort, ornament, luxury as unnecessary and probably dangerous distractions. Walter Benjamin writes:

  The talent of a good writer is to make use of his style to supply his thought with a spectacle of the kind provided by a well-trained body. He never says more than he has thought. Hence, his writing redounds not. . . to his own benefit, but solely to the benefit of what he wants to say.

  To write only what you have thought is to bring a kind of materiality, or rather materialism (as in historical materialism), to your writing. The idealistic, the metaphysical, the fantastical, that which strives through leaps of faith and imagination for what is unknown—and perhaps unknowable, inarticulable—is forsaken. The work attains instead, as is indisputably the case in Kramer’s plays, a powerful gravity, deeply rooted in the real.

  It is through this materialism, which makes words “redound solely to the benefit” of a goal other than one’s own aggrandizement, that The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me escape self-hagiography, avoid all but the most generous, expansive narcissism. Kramer, like Shaw and Brecht, has forged a very public personality, a familiar voice and political stance through which his plays must be refracted by any reader or audience. The public Larry Kramer is virtually indistinguishable from the protagonist of his plays, Ned Weeks; even more than Shaw’s Jack Tanner, Weeks is an author-surrogate, a Benjaminian “good writer” whose speech is almost entirely devoted to the cause he and his progenitor/creator hopes to advance. The language that, in these plays, creates the protagonist is a language ultimately dedicated to much more than any single self, and so the protagonist in question, Ned Weeks, is himself dedicated by the nature of the matter (language) of which he is composed, to the greater world, and the greater good. The title, The Destiny of Me, can, at first hearing, sound something like “Me! Me! Me!” The materiality of the language, however, as well as the dialectic that drives the play forward—the tensions between interior, intimate memory and exterior social transformation—turn the titular “Me” away from the self-regarding and solipsistic toward something huge and Whitmanesque—a democratic “Me” that is surrogate for “We,” a paradoxically inclusive egoism, a self that is communal, shared.

  The unornamented quality of the language, rooted in a desire for truth, in which desire is implicit a belief in the existence of truth, announces Kramer’s Jewishness, notwithstanding his protestations in interviews that he is “a bad Jew” (in the sense of being nonbelieving). Although God and His promise of a better life hereafter may have been dismissed by Kramer as just another false comfort, the muscular directness of his writing, its spontaneous spoken-ness, its proud discomfort, its inelegant elegance, are Jewish tropes. Perhaps the rejection of the imagistic by certain Jewish writers originates in the Second Commandment’s interdict against graven images, against representation. This is the voice of Torah, of Talmud, of the scrupulous, tireless parsing of Moral Law. Certainly Ned Weeks calls to mind, as has been often remarked about his author, of one of the prophets of the Holy Scriptures, an Amos, perhaps, torn equally between love and fury for his people, righteous indignation manifest as towering rage shot through with heartbreak, with unrequited but inextinguishable devotion.

  Kramer’s unadorned prose is evocative of the best Jewish-American writing: of Singer, Malamud, Bellow, Ozick, Roth, Kunitz, Paley. This is the speech of the newly arrived, the immigrant, the oppositionist, the pariah; it is underclass, or working class, or even middle-class. If it has any aristocratic bearing, this voice, this language belongs to an aristocracy of intellectual fearlessness, and never to one of social privilege. Insofar as this plain, tormented speech derives from an absolute, uncompromising fealty to the search for what is true, to the centrality of that search above all others, it is Jewish speech, deriving as well from the search’s concomitant, the Jewish assumption that the truth is in fact graspable through an application of courage and will and intelligence. Larry Kramer’s speech is Jewish in the devotion it displays to the messianic conviction that the truth liberates if its precepts are entirely engaged with, and lived.

  This plainness of speech is not, it must be said, particularly gay. The quill wielded in the writing of these plays is neither cut from a feather nor dipped in an ink of any discernibly violet hue. Gay theater descends from the twin tributaries of Tennessee Williams on the “legitimate” side, and such artists as Jack Smith and Charles Ludlam on the demimondaine, distaff side. It cascades from the former in torrents of voluptuous, even delirious exclamation, and from the latter in an even more delirious reveling in the groves of inspired camp, dazzling with irony. Gay male literature descends from Oscar Wilde to Ronald Firbank to Edmund White to Dale Peck, gay male poetry from Whitman t
o Mark Doty, writers for whom long-breathed lines and intricately detailed surfaces are expressions of agency, are (for contemporary writers at least) a proud displaying and a public reclamation of identity, a rejection of shame, a manifestation of power. Larry Kramer’s other major play, Just Say No, a wicked, giddy farce with a serious core, employs many of the exuberant gestures one associates with gay writing. If read in the context of the gay literature of its time, his superb novel Faggots only deviates from a comfortable, honorable niche in that genre when one understands the way in which its profoundly angry, moral core, whence, finally, something like prophecy begins to flow, seeks to cancel the book’s generic membership—while at the same time its style and wit reaffirm its allegiances.

  The Normal Heart or The Destiny of Me are unlike any gay drama that precedes them. For all that gay men are their principal, passionately addressed subject and object, at no point in either text does the playwright exploit the conventions of gay theater. The plays are never voluptuous, never ironic; every moment of tentative, awkward camp is batted away by pain, rage and sorrow as soon as it appears. Here are two of gay theater’s most significant plays, but to find a voice to serve firmly as their antecedent, one must look outside the canon of gay literature and gay theater practice. One thinks of Eugene O’Neill, demanding that a theater believed capable merely of entertainment surrender its glamour and its magic spells and disfigure itself, if necessary, in a dive down to the bottom of the ocean, to find what exists there, to bring submerged reality up to light and air. O’Neill, and later Arthur Miller, are the forebears of a realist, anti-lyrical theater that bravely tosses aside the habiliments of conventional pleasure, seeking ever greater depths. Under the pressures of the deep, language loses its mellifluence, its ease. Its compression bears witness to its strenuous, fearless diving. Near the conclusion of America’s greatest play, Long Day’s Journey into Night (another play addressing, as Kramer’s plays do, life estranged, outside society and outside one’s own family, and also addressing the relationship of money to health care), Edmund says: “Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.” More than classic, or Brechtian, or Jewish, the truest derivation of Larry Kramer’s diction in these plays can be traced back to the American stage.