The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me: Two Plays (2 page)

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 to 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.

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.