The Normal Heart E-Book

Larry Kramer

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Modern Plays
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 158

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Larry Kramer's passionate, polemical drama, set during the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. The Normal Heart traces the story of one man who, while his friends are dying around him, strives to break through a conspiracy of silence, indifference and hostility from public officials and the gay community, and gain recognition for a virus that threatens to change everything. The play received its British premiere at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1986. Thirty-five years after that premiere, the play's prescience and its searing emotional power are beyond doubt. It was revived on Broadway in 2011 (winning the Tony Award for Best Revival) and adapted for television in 2014 (receiving the Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie). This new edition of the play is published alongside a major revival at the National Theatre, London, in 2021, directed by Dominic Cooke. It features the definitive text of the play, extensive supplementary material including a new introduction by critic and broadcaster David Benedict, and tributes to Larry Kramer by Russell T Davies, Tony Kushner and Matthew López, all of whom have also contributed to the canon of dramatic work about HIV/AIDS – with, respectively, It's A Sin, Angels in America and The Inheritance.

Leseprobe

Larry Kramer

THE NORMAL HEART

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Foreword by Joseph Papp

Introduction by David Benedict

Acknowledgements

Production History

Production Notes

THE NORMAL HEART

Dedication

Epigraph

A Letter from Larry Kramer

Afterwords by Russell T Davies, Tony Kushner and Matthew López

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Foreword

Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart is a play in the great tradition of Western drama. In taking a burning social issue and holding it up to public and private scrutiny so that it reverberates with the social and personal implications of that issue, The Normal Heart reveals its origins in the theatre of Sophocles, Euripides and Shakespeare. In his moralistic fervor, Larry Kramer is a first cousin to nineteenth-century Ibsen and twentieth-century Odets and other radical writers of the 1930s. Yet, at the heart of The Normal Heart, the element that gives this powerful political play its essence, is love – love holding firm under fire, put to the ultimate test, facing and overcoming our greatest fear: death.

I love the ardour of this play, its howling, its terror and its kindness. It makes me very proud to have been its producer and caretaker.

Joseph Papp New York, 1985

Introduction: Look Back in AngerDavid Benedict

It’s more than slightly ironic that it was one of world’s most notorious chroniclers of heterosexuality – D. H. Lawrence – who made Larry Kramer synonymous with handling ideas of homosexuality. After a decade in the dustier echelons of the film business, the latter acquired the rights, wrote the adaptation for and produced the 1969 film of Lawrence’s Women in Love. Directed by Ken Russell, the legendary bad boy of British cinema, it was nominated for four Oscars, including one for Kramer’s screenplay. Not for nothing was a biography of Russell titled An Appalling Talent and, typically, he brought equal amounts of excellence and excess to bravura sequences vividly capturing the novel’s tone and intent, including Gerald’s suicide in the snow and the still daring, instantly famous nude-wrestling scene by firelight between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates.

Kramer’s adventures in the screen trade were not always as winning. Four years later, eying-up the prospects of the two-and-a-half-hour disaster that was the 1973 Burt Bacharach and Hal David movie musical Lost Horizon that for reasons inexplicable starred Ingmar Bergman’s muse, Bette Midler quipped: ‘I never miss a Liv Ullman musical.’ Lost Millions would have been a more accurate title – it bombed at the box office – and five years later made the cut for inclusion in the 1978 book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time. John Gielgud suffered through the shoot consoling himself with the fact that it would pay off an unpleasantly large tax bill, and the other person who suffered similarly at the hands of the producers and director but did well out of the film was its screenwriter, Larry Kramer.

Reflecting upon it over four decades later in 2017, he described it to San Francisco publication SF News as: ‘The only thing I’m truly ashamed of.’ But, as he went on to explain, he was talked into it since every time he turned it down, the producers offered more money. And, he added, miserable though his experience on it was, the final princely sum, via the financial know-how of his lawyer brother, gave him what every artist craves: years of freedom from financial worries. And it was that which afforded him the space and time to write his first wholly gay project.

Faggots, his 1978 novel, was something of a rarity: a gay novel from a major publisher (Random House). The industry had been loathe to publish, as it was then described, lesbian or gay fiction. Exactly thirty years earlier, the publication of Gore Vidal’s third novel The City and the Pillar, now widely considered to be the first gay novel from a mainstream American author with a self-accepting central character, looked to be a watershed, but The New York Times refused to run advertising for it and for the next six years Vidal’s books were effectively banned by all major newspapers. Things began to shift, albeit slowly, and by the early 1960s, key uncloseted voices including Jean Genet, Yukio Mishima, Mary Renault, James Baldwin, John Rechy and Christopher Isherwood began to be heard.

A novel very precisely of its time, Faggots was a caustic, more-than-semi-autobiographical portrait of a gay screenwriter in NYC searching for love in a culture he increasingly saw as in thrall to promiscuity, bathhouse sex and heavy recreational drug use, which made love near impossible to find, let alone sustain.

Newspaper reviews were savage, especially The New York Times, whose reviewer, the heterosexual John Lahr, had just published his entertainingly candid but judgemental Joe Orton biography Prick Up Your Ears. Covering it together with Andrew Holleran’s lushly written novel Dancer from the Dance, Lahr observed that Faggots ‘flits over the same New York terrain as Mr Holleran’s book… without an iota of his ability. Where Mr Holleran honors the sadness as well as the sensations of homosexual life, Mr Kramer merely exploits them. In Faggots, the love that dare not speak its name is hoarse from shouting.’

But it wasn’t just the straight press that had problems with the novel. Kramer’s forcefully proposed thesis was virulently hostile to the new-found sexual freedom embraced by post-Stonewall gay men for whom visible sexual freedom was a – arguably, the – defining personal and political statement. So much so, that the city’s one gay bookstore, the West Village’s Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop – the precursor to London’s Gay’s the Word – refused to stock it.

But within three years, Kramer’s heard but unheeded clarion call against what he saw as the dangers of rampant promiscuity began to resonate very differently.

On page twenty of the 3 July, 1981 edition of The New York Times, an article by Lawrence K. Altman appeared headlined, ‘Rare gay cancer seen in 41 homosexuals’. The opening paragraph was bald and shocking: ‘Doctors in New York and California have diagnosed among homosexual men 41 cases of a rare and often rapidly fatal form of cancer. Eight of the victims died less than 24 months after the diagnosis was made.’

The horror, and the terror, had begun.

*

By the end of 1985, the US death toll from HIV/AIDS had exceeded ten thousand, the overwhelming majority being young gay men in their thirties. In the UK, the Terrence Higgins Trust was three years into its existence, but although gay men were dying and the gay community was seriously frightened and organising, thus far AIDS was, relatively speaking, spreading more slowly. And it would be another year before the British Health Secretary Norman Fowler could persuade a less-than-enthusiastic Margaret Thatcher to permit the now-legendary cinema and TV advertising campaign voiced by John Hurt at his most gravelly and directed by Nicolas (Don’t Look Now) Roeg. In a fifty-second, much-repeated public-information film, an erupting volcano and a looming, doom-laden iceberg warned everyone in the country about what was described as the approaching AIDS epidemic. ‘If you ignore AIDS, it could be the death of you,’ was its ominous slogan. ‘Don’t die of ignorance.’

Back in October 1985, having just arrived in Manhattan, I was having dinner with Sandy, my ex-lover, and a couple of his friends, and was keen to know about what was happening. ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘about AIDS in this city.’

‘Put it this way,’ replied his pal Judy, a straight woman working in publishing. ‘I’ve not been to dinner in the last six months when the subject hasn’t come up in the first twenty minutes.’

Which is why, a week later, my friend Ellen and I were at The Public Theater for a matinee of The Normal Heart. It wasn’t the city’s first AIDS play. William M. Hoffman’s less polemical As Is had opened five weeks before Kramer’s play and had transferred to Broadway. But it was the latter that was causing serious buzz with rave reviews for its ferocious questioning of the prevailing attitudes of gay men both closeted and out, the politics of the city, and its fatally inadequate healthcare as infection rates were soaring, and gay men were ignored and dying. As The Public’s founding artistic director Joseph Papp said at the time: ‘Once in every ten years or so a play comes along that fulfils my original idea of what role my theater must play in society. The Normal Heart is that play.’

Witnessing its no-holds-barred arguments was like being scalded by sheer passion. Political passion. It was nothing less than a howl of righteous anger. Only later did I learn how completely Kramer’s central character’s political journey mirrored his own, from his history as a Cassandra-like warning figure right down to the complicated, pivotal relationship with his generous yet emotionally withholding lawyer brother.

The experience was, quite literally, transfixing. After the roar of applause that greeted the curtain call, the play’s cumulative emotional intensity continued to wash over me as Ellen and I just sat there, stunned, tears pouring down our cheeks, unable to leave. After the rest of the audience had slowly filed out, we made our way shakily out into a wintry, inappropriately sunny afternoon.

Obviously, the writing spoke specifically to me as a gay man, but that wasn’t what shook me so hard. I’d already experienced being directly addressed by sophisticated sexual politics in the theatre having, as a drama student, seen the original productions of Martin Sherman’s Bent and Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine in 1979 alone. More recently, I had just finished touring with the UK’s national lesbian and gay theatre company Gay Sweatshop (founded in 1975), acting in Noël Greig’s Poppies, a play about gay men and pacifism at the brink of World War Two. Gay theatre was not new to me. And since Ellen, a straight woman, shared my response, the play’s impact could not be written off with the absurdly lazy phrase, preaching to the converted.

What made an extraordinary piece of theatre so electrifying was its immediacy, its timing. And you didn’t have to be a theatre expert to spot it. In the New York Daily News, Liz Smith, undisputed queen of gossip columnists, declared it: ‘An astounding drama… a damning indictment of a nation in the middle of an epidemic with its head in the sand.’

An intensely personal piece of polemic, The Normal Heart was a history play and one, vitally, about the slap-bang here and now. People were dying all around and, to manhandle Arthur Miller, attention was not being paid.

*

By the time the play reached London in March 1986, some of its power was slightly blunted by timing of a different kind beyond the text. By then, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus had been identified as being sexually transmitted; the new concept of safe sex was not just saving lives, it had radically changed the debate about sexual behaviour – and the play’s discussions about how gay men should or shouldn’t adapt. It was a hit in its run at the Royal Court with Martin Sheen playing Ned Weeks, but it struggled through its transfer to the West End’s Albery Theatre (now the Noël Coward) with Tom Hulce and then John Shea replacing him. Through no fault of Kramer’s, the real-life adoption of safe sex left some of the play’s arguments feeling a shade outdated. Despite its overwhelming dynamism and importance, there was a sense that, for some, parts of it played out the adage that nothing dates so fast as the recent past.

Which may be one reason why the rightly lauded 2011 Broadway production directed by Joel Grey and George C. Wolfe – it won three Tonys including Best Revival of a Play – and the subsequent Emmy-award-winning HBO film adaptation written by Kramer and directed by Ryan Murphy – worked better than the London version. 20/20 hindsight accorded the play a fresh standpoint. The specific vicissitudes governing day-to-day existence for gay men when seen in 1987 were swept aside. The passage of time allowed audiences to experience Kramer’s baseline dramatic arguments, about how we behaved, how we were seen and our demand for recognition, in their original context and in their rightful light.

In the years following the original powerhouse production, added historical perspective enabled other writers to follow in Kramer’s footsteps in a variety of ways proving, above all else, that there is no single way to tell our shared story. Among many others, Tony Kushner interrogated history with piercing questions in Angels in America, premiered in two parts in 1991 and 1993, and Matthew López in 2018 used E. M. Forster’s Howards End as a prism through which to view the era in The Inheritance.

In the UK, Andy Kirby’s play for Gay Sweatshop, Compromised Immunity, toured the country in 1987, opening eyes and providing an emotional touchstone for predominantly but not exclusively gay audiences. Kevin Elyot used waspish humour to disguise the distress coursing through his Chekhovian group portrait of friends lying and dying in his 1994 masterpiece, My Night With Reg, in which AIDS is simultaneously ever-present and unmentioned. At the opposite end of the spectrum came Russell T Davies’ five-part 2021 miniseries It’s A Sin (originally entitled The Boys) which explored the decade in Britain for gay men from 1981 onwards, and exploded all of Channel 4’s expectations. Along with both the BBC and ITV, the network had originally turned the project down, but the series was a critical sensation and won 18.9m viewers on its All4 streaming platform, making it the service’s biggest-ever ‘box set’ drama series, and its most-binged to date.

Most playwrights want their work to endure, for their dramatic insight to be valued for decades, if not longer. Looked at objectively, one might argue a case for saying that The Normal Heart was an exception; that it might even have been designed with built-in obsolescence: its arguments should be won so that people could then live and move on. Written, as it was, at a time when there was not so much as a whisper of life-extending, antiretroviral drug therapies, much less a cure, it arose out of fury. It was, and remains, an argumentative play that harangued its characters and glared at its audiences, alerting them to the very real fear that having possibly misspent the past and jeopardised the present, there might not be a future. But Kramer wasn’t writing solely for the moment. He was intent upon the play enduring because his warnings came from a spirit of hope.

That hope is embodied in the very act of the play being revived, as with Dominic Cooke’s new National Theatre production which is in rehearsal at the time of writing. And 2021 lends other perspectives to the play, not least Larry Kramer’s death from pneumonia last May. And then there’s the frame of Covid-19: an urgent play about a gathering pandemic revived during another pandemic.

There is, clearly, a whole new audience for the play. And for those of us who lived through the initial HIV/AIDS outbreak and have been lucky enough to survive into a world where, in the West, treatment can reduce transmissions to zero, experiencing Kramer’s white-hot masterpiece remains salutary, a chance to look back in anger. As he once said to Andrew Holleran, ‘This is not a play about measles.’

Culture critic and broadcaster David Benedict is the former artistic director of Gay Sweatshop. He is currently the London critic for Variety and columnist on The Stage.

Acknowledgements

For the original 1985 production and first publication

Theatre is an especially collaborative endeavour. Many people help to make a play.

I would like to thank: Arthur Kramer (as always), A. J. Antoon, Ann and Don Brown, Michael Callen, Michael Carlisle, Joseph Chaikin, Kate Costello, Dr James D’Eramo, Helen Eisenbach, Dr Roger Enlow, Tom Erhardt, Robert Ferro, Emmett Foster, Jim Fouratt, Sanford Friedman, Dr Alvin Friedman-Kien, Dr Patrick Hennessey, Richard Howard, Jane Isay, Dr Richard Isay, Chuck Jones, Owen Laster, Dr Frank Lilly, Joan and David Maxwell, Rodger McFarlane, Patrick Merla, Hermine and Maurice Nessen, Mike Nichols, Nick Olcott, Charles Ortleb, Johnnie Planco, Judy Prince, Margaret Ramsay, Mary Anne and Douglas Schwalbe, Will Schwalbe, Dr Joseph Sonnabend, and Tim Westmoreland.

I particularly thank my intelligent cast, and our director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, a humble, gentle man of great patience and courage.

I give special thanks and tribute to Dr Linda J. Laubenstein.

I am grateful to the following works of scholarship: ‘American Jewry During the Holocaust,’ a report edited by Seymour Maxwell Finger for the American Jewish Commission on the Holocaust, Hon. Arthur J. Goldberg, Chairman, March 1984 (the excerpt quoted herein is used by permission); Israel in the Mind of America by Peter Grose, Alfred A. Knopf, 1983; American Jewry’s Public Response to the Holocaust, 1938–44: An Examination Based upon Accounts in the Jewish Press and Periodical Literature, A Doctoral Dissertation by Haskel Lookstein, Yeshiva University, January 1979, University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan; While Six Million Died, A Chronicle of American Apathy by Arthur D. Morse, copyright © 1967, The Overlook Press, Woodstock, New York, 1983; The Abandonment of the Jews, America and the Holocaust 1941–1945 by David S. Wyman, Pantheon Books, 1984.

For encouraging, challenging, inspiring, and teaching me – for caring – I am exceptionally indebted to Gail Merrifield, the Director of Plays at the New York Shakespeare Festival, as I am to this remarkable organisation’s Literary Manager, Bill Hart.

Indeed, there is not a person at the New York Shakespeare Festival to whom I cannot say, Thank you.

There are no words splendid enough to contain and convey what Joseph Papp has meant to me, and to this play.

There are many people who lived this play, who lived these years, and who live no more. I miss them.

For the 2011 Broadway revival

Daryl Roth, you are the greatest, most generous and loving producer any writer could ever have. There is no one to touch you. And everyone you have chosen to be around you – most particularly the indefatigable, loving Wendy Orshan, is as perfect as you are. You determined to find an audience for this play, and you did. You were especially determined to find a way to bring young people to see this play, and you did.

George Wolfe lives where only the greatest artists live, in some place far away and special, and private, and with luck, is sometimes dispatched preciously to mortal writers like me. George, I am so in awe of what you have done with my play and I want to work with you forever.

Together you have brought this great and perfect cast together, Joe and Hickey and Ellen and Lee and Jim and Patrick and Mark and Richard and Luke and Wayne.

Thank you all for the great gift of your talents.