JOHN LAMB
Mickey (Jonathan Hey), Bruce (Jeffery M. Wright), and Ned (Stephen Peirick) talk to the mayor's assistant (Jeremy Goldmeier) in The Normal Heart at Stray Dog Theatre.
How different it is to see The Normal Heart in pandemic times. About the early days of the AIDS crisis, The Normal Heart feels very current as characters try to understand the deadly new virus gripping the gay community.
There are cockamamie theories about where AIDS came from. (“Maybe the disease is transmitted by dogs and gays get it because they have so many dogs,” is one from the play.) And there's optimistic rhetoric about “we just need to wait for this all to blow over” after an imagined Age of Abstinence where everyone willingly stops having sex to protect themselves and stop the virus’ spread.
Yeah, right. At the very suggestion, one character argues that his rights are being infringed on, and it’s his body. He can kill himself if he wants to.
It all sounds so familiar.
But the AIDS epidemic and our pandemic are also wildly different, and what happens in The Normal Heart doesn’t look anything like the response to COVID-19 because, well, there was a response to COVID-19, while gay men were left to die of AIDS while almost everyone looked away.
One person not looking away is Ned Weeks (played by Stephen Peirick), a gay, Jewish writer, who learns about the alarming virus and, with some friends, starts an organization to raise awareness. The only problem is Ned is not politic. He’s blunt to the point of rude, loud, and always spoiling for a fight. Bruce Niles (played by Jeffery M. Wright) is closeted, polite, politic. He is elected president of the nonprofit, while Ned is the director.
Tensions mount, infection rates rise, and Ned alienates almost everyone around him, including his brother Ben (played by David Wassilak), whose homophobia lead to Ned going to years of therapy looking for a "cure" to homophobia.
It’s an explosive play that doesn’t need a lot of help. It is so laden with facts and figures and big speeches that to go heavy-handed on the visual message is simply overkill. Stray Dog Theatre keeps the set simple: It’s a wall of boxes with names on them, each representing a life lost to AIDS. Characters bring boxes on stage as part of the show’s action — for example, one contains papers for a mailing — and then add the boxes to the stack, turning them so the audience can see the names. The accumulation is a subtle reminder of the increasing death count.
The Normal Heart requires a cast that can trade in subtlety. The pressure of the situation (and its horror) is causing everyone to lose it, but they can't chew up the scenery. When Bruce (Wright), has to describe how his lover died of AIDS, there's audible sniffing in the audience. It helps that in a play full of shouting, he delivers the monologue quietly, struggling at times to finish the tale.
Mickey (played by Jonathan Hey), who has been helping with the nonprofit but now finds his job in jeopardy due to Ned, reaches his breaking point. He finally snaps at Ned for shaming gay men about sex. Under Gary Bell's direction, the moment resonates as it should, profoundly understandable, even if you don't agree.
But the center of the play is the annoying and righteous Ned. You're rolling your eyes at him one minute, nodding along the next. Peirick is able to walk that line, letting his anger and tunnel vision get the better of him for all the right reasons. He’s pissed that the mayor has taken 14 months to see him. He's pissed that people are telling him to stop scaring everyone. He’s pissed that gays are giving more to straight causes than to his. And he’s pissed at closeted gays who think that keeping their secret is more important than protecting their health.
When his boyfriend gets diagnosed with the mysterious illness, Ned’s anger intensifies. But all he can do is continue to rage as everyone around him tries to get him to see reason, to compromise. But compromise means giving up.
“Weakness terrifies me,” Ned says. “My father was weak, and I’m afraid I’ll be just like him.”
The Normal Heart is autobiographical. In the early ’80s, playwright Larry Kramer founded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis which has the same aims as the unnamed nonprofit in the play. He modeled Ned on himself. Boyfriend Felix (played by Joey Saunders) was modeled on New York Times columnist John Duka, a “wry roguish admixture of Cary Grant and the Duke of Windsor.” Felix also writes for the time, but never quite reaches that level of affectation (which is for the best), but he does have a smug charm that as he courts never-been-in-love-before Ned.
The play is very of its time: There’s talk about former New York Mayor Ed Koch, complaints about Ronald Reagan, very wide ties and rotary phones; but it also is eternal. A group of people that mainstream America mostly ignored was dying, and the response was a collective shrug.
It is this invisibility that infuriates Ned the most. As Felix says at the beginning of the play, his column is full of gay fashionistas, designers, artists and chefs, he just doesn’t say that they’re gay. Isn’t he doing his part? For Ned, that invisibility was part of what killed nearly an entire generation of gay men.
But The Normal Heart forces you to see. Yes, Ned yells a lot. And you find yourself agreeing with his friends that he needs to quiet down. Then you look at the boxes on the stage and see what that silence costs.
The Normal Heart is written by Larry Kramer and directed by Gary Bell. It will be presented through June 25 by Stray Dog Theatre (2336 Tennessee Avenue, 314-865-1995). Tickets are $25 to $30. Showtime is 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday.
