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

  The plays of O’Neill have their political dimensions. Their preoccupations with money, dislocation, vengeful memory, hollow dreams are all American political themes. Still, it would be hard to justify calling O’Neill a manifestly political writer, given his spiritual obsessions, his theological questioning, his soul wrestling, the specifically Christian agony that underlies most of his work.

  Larry Kramer is a political writer. He has stated repeatedly that formal aesthetic concerns are no great concern of his, that he chooses different media (novel, screenplay, essay, play) depending on which seems most useful at a given juncture to the accomplishment of an explicitly social goal. The break Kramer makes with gay theater and the link he had forged with O’Neill and Miller in his Weeks family plays are largely accidental, incidental to his purpose, which is to effect social change.

  The Normal Heart is profoundly political, a play in which a momentous event in a man’s life—falling in love for the first time, harvesting on a personal level one of the sweetest fruits (so to speak) of liberation, which is love—is overwhelmed by a historical event, by the arrival of the plague, by the political crisis it engenders. The insight, the political wisdom of the author of The Normal Heart, is that he eschews the contemplative, speculative, idealist path to wisdom and insight. In the face of a calamity, the play, appropriate to its moment, is plunged by the playwright into action, into political response. The Normal Heart is, in one sense, remarkably, a play about fund-raising and organizing, and as such, in dramatic literature, it is sui generis. Ned and Felix’s love story contends for center stage with and at many moments is crowded from the center by the onrush of the meta-personal, the external, by betrayal and confusion and idiocy and cowardice and courage, by the shadow of death on a holocaustal scale. In capturing the conflict occasioned in an individual, and in all individuals, by political engagement on the one hand and the private preserves of Eros on the other; the conundrum posed by a clash between having social agency and a social life; in depicting so savagely, accurately and honestly the dilemma faced by people confronted by historical forces; by masterfully and relentlessly colliding personal pathology against grand historical misadventure, wisdom and insight are attained.

  A blending of epic and lyric, epic and elegy, The Normal Heart will endure long after the AIDS crisis has passed. It will survive in the same way that A Doll’s House has survived the world-altering successes of the feminist revolution: the problematics of change, human and historical change, have their constants, and Larry Kramer’s recognition and delineation of those constants will endure.

  The Normal Heart is transformed and deepened by being considered alongside The Destiny of Me, and vice versa. The first play ends with a classical liberal Utopian vision—again, note the earthbound concreteness of this vision, its unembellished simplicity:

  Felix, when they invited me to Gay Week at Yale, they had a dance. . . . In my old college dining hall, just across campus from that tiny freshman room where I wanted to kill myself because I thought I was the only gay man in the world—they had a dance. Felix, there were six hundred young men and women there. Smart, exceptional young men and women . . .

  The progress, real and anticipated, implicit in this passage has as its counterweight (or perhaps counterpunch would be more accurate) the bleak closing moments of The Destiny of Me, in which the past, in the form of a frightened, vulnerable child, asking his grizzled adult incarnation what his destiny is, is bequeathed a glimpse of a truly awful future:

  You’re going to go to eleven shrinks. You won’t fall in love for forty years. And when a nice man finally comes along and tries to teach you to love him and love yourself, he dies from a plague. Which is waiting to kill you, too.

  This is cruel, and terrifying. A conditional survival, so morally ambiguous a goal, is the furthest look forward Destiny is willing to allow. The gratitude which is uttered like a prayer or a line from a love poem at the end of Normal Heart (”Thank you, Felix”) has as its answer the deeply ambivalent declaration that closes Destiny: “I want to stay a little longer.” Stay, but only a little longer.

  The dialogue in Destiny between Ned and his younger incarnation, Alexander, suggests a porousness among present, future and past. The past looks to the present, as Walter Benjamin imagined, asking to be rescued, endowing the present with the power of rescue. If the enemy wins, if there is to be no victory, no triumph, everything is lost. “Not even the dead will be safe,” Benjamin warns. Destiny stages what the living owe the dead, the past: rescue. The play also suggests, terrifyingly, that the rescue may not be forthcoming.

  The two plays merge into a single work of literature. The invisible but electric presence of the offstage activists in Destiny offsets Weeks’s despair, couched in his unresistant, beleaguered body, with their ongoing resistance and communally generated hope; and they are his “children.” They are ACT UP, the glorious consequence of the brutal, costly battling witnessed in Normal Heart. The disappointments, misunderstandings, anathemas, back-stabbings, all wretchedly inescapable in any organizing effort, have, by the time of Destiny, produced an army of warriors, “smart, exceptional young men and women.” We are taught by this flowering of activism to doubt despair.

  And we are also taught to anticipate despair, for the effort to remember has only, cruelly, resulted in the future managing to betray the past. The activists, Ned’s children, cannot save him from the viral enemy inside; and Ned, ultimately, cannot offer Alexander the promise of a golden tomorrow. Transcending the personal miseries of the past may not result in future joy, and the fantastically successful effort to organize politically is routed by human foibles and worse, by science and the obstinacy of viral sublife.

  Where else in dramatic literature is there such a treatment of the life-and-death cycle of people and political change? One needs to reach back to the chronicles of Shakespeare, back to the Greeks. Larry Kramer isn’t Sophocles and he isn’t Shakespeare; we don’t have Sophocleses or Shakespeares, not these days, but we do have, on rare occasion, remarkable accomplishment, and Kramer’s is remarkable, invaluable, and rare. How else to dramatize revolution accurately, truthfully, politically, than by showing it to be tragic as well as triumphant? And on the other hand, if the medical, biological, political, and familial failures of Destiny produce, by the play’s end, despair again; if we are plunged back into night, it cannot be different from the night with which Normal Heart began, rife with despair and terror, and pregnant with an offstage potential for transformation, for hope.

  Failure awaits any political movement, even a spectacularly successful movement such as the one Larry Kramer helped to spark and organize. Political movements, liberation movements, revolutions, are as subject to time, decline, mortality, tragedy as any human enterprise, or any human being. Death waits for every living thing, no matter how vital or brilliant its accomplishment; death waits for people and for their best and worst efforts as well. Politics is a living thing, and living things die. The mistake is to imagine otherwise, to believe that progress doesn’t generate as many new problems as it generates blessings, to imagine, foolishly, that the struggle can be won decisively, finally, definitively. No matter what any struggle accomplishes, time, life, death bring in their changes, and new oppressions are always forming from the ashes of the old. The fight for justice, for a better world, for civil rights or access to medicine, is a never-ending fight, at least as far as we have sight to see. The full-blooded description of this truth, the recognition and dramatization of a political cycle of birth, death, rebirth, defeat, renewal—this is true tragedy, in which absolute loss and devastation, Nothing is arrived at, and from this Nothing, something new is born. This tragic vision is perhaps the true, unique genius of these plays.

  2.

  The Destiny of Me rounds out and completes The Normal Heart with redemptive moments of an understanding that brings forgiveness—forgiveness, not release, not freedom from pain. Nothing in the plays is more moving or more compelling than Kramer
’s unflinching portrait of his two impossible parents, so unforgivable, so inexcusable, so much the victims and the victimizers, all at once. When Ned expresses too much sympathy for his abusive father, his younger self reprimands him, and the audience: “Don’t you dare feel sorry for him!” And don’t you dare not to. The author of The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me was badly abused by psychoanalysts and has many unkind things to say about psychoanalysis, but he is clearly its creature as well as one of its many critics. His search for the truth is that of the talented analysand’s. The poet H.D., in her Tribute to Freud, wrote about her psychoanalysis as a matter of life-and-death striving toward transformation:

  . . . I have the feeling of holding my breath under water. As if I were searching under water for some priceless treasure, and if I bobbed up to the surface the clue of its whereabouts would be lost forever. So I, though seated upright, am in a sense diving, head-down, underwater—in another element, and as I seem now so near to getting the answer or finding the treasure, I feel that my whole life, my whole being, will be blighted forever if I miss this chance. I must not lose my grip, I must not lose the end of the picture and so miss the meaning of the whole, so far painfully perceived. I must hold on here or the picture will blur over and the sequence will be lost. In a sense, it seems that I am drowning; already half-drowned to the ordinary dimensions of space and time, I know that I must drown, as it were, completely in order to come out on the other side of things (like Alice with her looking-glass or Perseus with his mirror). I must drown and come out on the other side, or rise to the surface after the third time down, not dead to this life but with a new set of values, my treasure dredged from the depth. I must be born again or break utterly.

  The protean Alexander/Ned, name and identity tossed about by all manner of tempests, nearly breaks, and both is and is not born again; or rather, is born again, but born again surrounded by ghosts, born again into a horrible dying. In their ardent pursuit of memory and understanding, in their simultaneous optimism and pessimism, the Weeks-family plays are genuinely Freudian tragedy. One drowns to come out on the other side. Annihilation brings new life.

  I remember, when I saw Destiny at the Lucille Lortel Theater in the winter of 1992, one moment I found jaw-dropping: when Ned, observer/participant in his bygone family drama, admonishes his mother, the great and terrible Rena, parading in a slip and bra:

  NED: Ma, why don’t you put on a dress?

  RENA: If you’re going to become a writer, you must learn to be more precise with words.

  NED: Do not sit half-naked with your adolescent son. Is that precise enough?

  It’s a brilliant, complicated moment, funny and very sad. It occurs just when this fierce, unhappy woman is talking about “how impossible it is for a woman to be independent.” She is reaching for nascent consciousness, toward her own liberation. In the context of the political drama, her frustration and sense of injustice feed her young son, his surprising, even happy self-assurance in the present and the fighter he will become. The character of Ned-as-a-boy, Alexander, is his mother’s champion. But in the context of the family drama, her battle for liberation is threatening, disruptive, it’s one more aspect of a personality too large for the role she’s been forced into, a woman who can’t accept boundaries. Her energy, her anger, her lack of boundaries—including perhaps sexual and familial ones—will coruscate those she loves. The man her son will become, aware after the fact of the damage she’s doing even while bestowing the gift of agency, undercuts her, pathologizes her—not necessarily without cause or merit, but all the same she is undercut.

  There are ambiguities, fallacies, in Rena’s externalized sense of her oppression—this is, after all, after World War II, it isn’t the nineteenth century, she isn’t Nora, and she’s sort of crazy. So too are there ambiguities and inujustice in Ned’s chastisement. Is she being politically sabotaged to secure the family? Is she behaving inappropriately? I don’t know how to answer that, but the moment is a good one because it makes me squirm. My jaw dropped at the chutzpah of the lines, the sudden intimacy. The character/playwright is betraying his mother, not only her ambitions but her privacy, his family’s secrets. He is even, in a sense, transgressing against his larger family, the gay community, implying, or at the very least risking the misreading, that in Ned’s complaint is the etiology of his sexual orientation, a very risky implication these days, but again, not without at least enough conditional, circumspective plausibility to merit its staging, if one has the courage, the nerve to do so.

  (And no, I do not believe that seductive mommies make gay sons; but I do believe that the family romance has some part in shaping sexual desire, gay, straight or otherwise. And any allusion to this truth, in the Age of the Genome, makes me happy.)

  Rena is saying what is very hard to say politically, and more than she intends personally; Ned is saying what is hard to say personally, and more than he intends politically; and it would be nice if what we need would always coincide with what was good for us, or with what was generous or just, but there are always these discrepancies. The playwright leaves the engine running, resolving nothing, not forcing resolution on what cannot be resolved, on what is tragic, allowing the tragic to generate new syntheses. Time brings on its changes. Liberation, personal or political, even attained, is not an end, a point of arrival, but a point of departure, a step toward something new.

  3.

  Time works its changes, and at any given point in his life, Larry Kramer is being abused as a left-wing hysteric or deplored as a right-wing antisex scold. He is impressively unconcerned, at least publicly, with the constant stream of opprobrium sent in his direction, and in fact rather (in)famously invites it; he is one of the few remaining public intellectuals who is willing and eager to brawl. He has paid a high personal price for the brawling. It has cost him much time, and probably great sorrow and fear. The sacrifice of time and emotional life for the sake of inflaming and expanding public debate is a rare thing in a writer in this day and age, a sacrifice too seldom recognized and honored, too often shrugged off as a well-deserved comeuppance.

  What seems to matter most to Larry Kramer is the incessant disruption of business as usual, the refusal to be silent or polite. This refusal is praiseworthy. It is only to be expected that any person so completely engaged, so entirely committed to action (and discourse as he discourses is a potent form of action) will make mistakes, will enrage and appall. Given the sheer amount of engagement, of public declaration, it is astounding how often history and reality have affirmed what Kramer has proposed.

  His campaign against the oversexualization of gay male life, against indiscriminate, profligate fucking, in favor of long-term commitment (the antimonogamist riposte to which preference, by the way, is given a fair amount of eloquent stage time in Normal Heart) has caused a good deal of unhappiness in our community, as one learns simply by reading the plays. This campaign of Kramer’s is, in my opinion, a brave opening gambit in the pursuit of what must surely be the next step after sexual revolution and liberation, namely the articulation of a new ethics of sexuality. The revolution isn’t over and liberation has not yet arrived, but looking ahead to the next step after the triumph of our efforts cannot be considered premature. It is, rather, essential—for without a forward vision, how are we to progress? The monogamy-versus-promiscuity model is clearly inadequate to our purposes, and if Kramer relies too heavily on such a model, then criticism is appropriate, but not a rejection of his anguished call for personal responsibility.

  The homosexual right, pretending that the homosexual revolution has not been a sexual revolution, uses “personal responsibility,” or rather an imaginary lack thereof, as a canard with which to discredit the homosexual left. Dividing the community into the “personally responsible” and the “sexually misbehaving,” gay and lesbian conservatives seek to desexualize sexual orientation, to locate the cause of our general disenfranchisement in what they bemoan as the lack of propriety, decency, maturity, sobriety,
“family values” manifest in some undesirable percentage of our population—a percentage that happens to coincide, in the writings of the right, precisely with the percentage of our community that is activist and left. These revisionists want to rewrite our liberation as a begging for, and perhaps a slow granting of, a place at the table of power. They want to demote our history of effective, collective, militant action to the status of sideshow, a distraction from the real work conducted in private meetings by well-heeled, well-placed conservative individuals—hoping thereby to earn shiny credentials to flash at Republican conventions and other assemblages of virulent homophobes. With “personal responsibility” as their battle cry, the gay and lesbian right seeks to remove homosexual enfranchisement from its place as a chapter in the book of liberation and paste it squarely in the book of the irresistible rise of entrepreneurial individualism.

  But Larry Kramer’s invocation of personal responsibility is not consonant with theirs. Kramer’s demand that we save ourselves, that we take responsibility for ourselves, is historically, communally based. His is a demand always accompanied by a powerful depiction of its context—historical, and ongoing, homophobia, life-threatening oppression, which he has time and again (and in both of these plays) likened to the holocaust. Kramer has declared the homophobia behind the wide world’s response to the AIDS epidemic a great crime against humanity, and in doing so he has renamed the ostensibly biological as actually political. This act of renaming, this exposing of ideology, is antithetical to the practices and program of the political right.