The Normal Heart

Bradway review by Adam Feldman

In its 1985 debut at the Public Theater, Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart had a beat like the ticking of a time bomb. The AIDS epidemic was by then full-blown, no one knew how wide it would spread, and the tabloids foamed with hysteria. Kramer’s autobiographical jeremiad— aimed equally at governments (too careless in confronting the crisis) and gay activists (too careful in confronting those governments and too protective of hard-won sexual freedom)—was widely received as a public-service announcement. “Too urgent to ignore,” is how Liz Smith described the play, and the intensity of its rage helped usher in a new age of gay activism, epitomized by Kramer’s own ACT UP—a more aggressive version of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, whose founding and fault lines are at the core of the The Normal Heart. 

Now making its Broadway debut in a stunningly effective revival, Kramer’s ferociously rhetorical work is has lost little of its urgency; if anything, changes to the AIDS crisis allow our focus to expand to the play’s other concerns. It is essentially Ibsen for our times: An Enemy of the People, with Kramer’s loudmouthed surrogate Ned Weeks—played with streaming intelligence and writhing neurosis by the Joe Mantello—cast as the teller of unpopular truths about the dangers of gay sex. “We just feel that you can’t tell people how to live,” cautions a more conservative colleague, Bruce (Pace), when what Ned is really trying to do is tell people how not to die.

What makes the play more than a therapeutic “I told you so” from a vindicated Cassandra is that the playwright is unsparing about his own failures as well as those of others. This is no mere antiauthoritarian screed: It is a mesh of internal arguments—intramunicipal, intragay, intra-Jewish, intrafamilial, intra–Larry Kramer—whose questions resonate beyond the specifics of the disease that is their catalyst. And the play’s complexity is brought to pulse-pounding life in its Broadway revival. Originally billed as a reading, this is actually a full production—with directorial credit shared by George C. Wolfe and Joel Grey—with an extraordinary cast.

The faultless ensemble, one of the strongest I have seen on Broadway, includes an impeccable John Benjamin Hickey as the first man to break through Ned’s defenses and Ellen Barkin as an early AIDS doctor. Barkin brings down the house with a ferocious tirade of frustration at the slow pace of reaction to the epidemic; Pace commands tears with a superb account of the death of his lover, a passage that holds its own against the most gruesome messenger monologues of Greek tragedy. Jim Parsons provides exemplary comic relief and unexpected depth as a Southern activist in Ned’s group, and Patrick Breen, Mark Harelik, Luke Macfarlane, Richard Topol and Wayne Alan Wilcox provide admirable support. The entire company acts up a storm, and the production leaves you drenched. The Normal Heart is raw, scary and galvanizing; it is also hectoring, stiff and one-sided. That’s Kramer is a nutshell—and we still need his kind of nuts.

John Golden Theatre (see Broadway). By Larry Kramer. Dir. Joel Grey and George C. Wolfe. With Joe Mantello, John Benjamin Hickey, Ellen Barkin, Lee Pace. 2hrs 30mins. One intermission.