The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me: Two Plays (16 page)

As destiny would have it, I appear to have received a respite from my expected imminent demise, at least one sufficient enough to ask myself: what have I gone and done?

I call
The Destiny of Me
a companion play to the one I wrote in 1985,
The Normal Heart,
about the early years of AIDS. It’s about the same leading character, Ned Weeks, and the events of the earlier play have transpired before the curtain rises on the new one; it is not necessary, as they say, to have seen one to see the other. (The deathbed play remains to he written; now I have the chance to write a trilogy.)

Oh, I’ve had to make a few little changes. Instead of facing death so closely, Ned Weeks now only fears it mightily. And the hospital where he’d gone to die is now the hospital where he goes to try to live a little longer.

He still tries to figure out what his life’s been all about.

This play now seems very naked to me. I’m overwhelmed with questions that didn’t bother me before. Why was it necessary for me to write it? Why do I want people to see it? What earthly use is served by washing so much of “the Weeks family” linen in public?

When I wrote
The Normal Heart,
I had no such qualms. I knew exactly what I wanted to achieve and there was no amount of
anything that
could repress my hell-or-high-water determination to see that play produced, to hear my words screamed out in a theater, and to hope I’d change the world.

In what possible way could
The Destiny of Me
ever change the world?

About a dozen years ago I found myself talking to a little boy. I realized the little boy was me. And he was talking back. I was not only talking to myself but this myself was a completely different individual, with his own thoughts, defenses, and character, and a personality often most at odds with his grown-up self These conversations frightened me. It’s taken me years of psychoanalysis to rid myself of just such schizophrenic tendencies.

I found myself talking to this kid more and more. I found myself writing little scenes between the two of us. I was in trouble. I was falling in love with this kid. I, who face a mirror—and the world—each day with difficulty, had found something, inside myself, to love. I found myself writing this kid’s journey—one that could only complete itself in death.

I should point out that I have always hated
anything
that borders on the nonrealistic. I hate science fiction and horror movies. I
do not want to see a play, be it by Herb Gardner or Neil Simon or Luigi Pirandello, in which one actor (the author) talks to himself as embodied in another actor. My life has always been too bound up in harsh realities to believe in such fantastic possibilities, theatrical or otherwise. Nor have I ever been one to write comfortably in styles not realistic, not filled with facts and figures and
truth.
(Some readers tell me my novel,
Faggots,
is about as surreal a portrayal of the gay world as could be, but it was all the real McCoy to me.)

As I wrote on, in addition to worrying about my mother’s reaction, I began to taunt myself with other fears. There is only one
Long Day’s Journey into Night.
There is only one
Death of a Salesman.
And a million feeble attempts to duplicate their truth and to provoke their tears. And each playwright has only one family story to tell. And only one chance to tell it. Most, if they’re lucky, throw their feeble attempts in the waste basket or file them with the stuff they plan to bequeath to their alma mater or unload on the University of Texas.

I further complicated my task by determining to write a personal history: a journey to acceptance of one’s own homosexuality. My generation has had special, if not unique, problems along this way. We were the generation psychoanalysts tried to change. This journey, from discovery through guilt to momentary joy and toward AIDS, has been my longest, most important journey, as important as—no, more important than my life with my parents, than my life as a writer, than my life as an activist. Indeed, my homosexuality, as unsatisfying as much of it was for so long, has been the single most important defining characteristic of my life.

As I wrote of these journeys, and as we entered rehearsals, I found myself, over and over again, learning new things no amount of analysis had taught me. The father I’d hated became someone
sad to me; and the mother I’d adored became a little less adorable, and no less sad. And although I’d set out, at the least, to have my day in court, actors, those magicians, grabbed hold of my words, and what had been my characters asserted themselves, and my harsh judgments were turned around in my face! My mother and father were showing me who they were, and not the other way around.

Oh, why had I written this damn play anyway!

I’d started out wanting to write a tragedy. I’d read all sorts of books that tried to define precisely what one is, including not a few that told me I couldn’t write one anymore. I think the lives that many gay men have been forced to lead, with AIDS awaiting them after the decades-long journey from self-hate, is the stuff of tragedy. And I’d thought that the marriage my parents had was tragic, too; they could have had much better lives without each other.

But, once again, I discovered some surprising things. My younger self was very funny and spunky, and it’s the me of today who, despite one hundred years of therapy, has lost resilience. As for my parents’ lives, well, there is a difference between tragedy and sadness. I cannot bring myself to see my father as Willy Loman. Nor my mother as Medea or Clytemnestra or Antigone or Phèdre. Or Mary Tyrone. Or Joan of Arc. The stakes (pun intended) just weren’t the same.

So was my determination to see this play produced a desire for vengeance? For blame? For catharsis? Was it only hubris? (Anita Brookner enunciated many writers’ main motivation in the very title of one of her own books,
Look at Me.
)

I discovered long ago that writing doesn’t bring catharsis. Writing
The Normal Heart
did not release my anger or make me hate Ed Koch and Ronald Reagan less or alter the present sorry state of the AIDS plague for the better. Writing
Faggots
did not find me true love or make me any more lovable or, so far as I can see, start any
mass migration by the gay community to monogamous relationships. No, getting things off your chest doesn’t get them off for very long.

Carole Rothman, the artistic director at Second Stage in New York, herself a parent, said she was uncomfortable about doing a play that “blamed” parents. (Joe Papp said he wouldn’t put on any play where a father hit a son. I always thought this said more about Joe than my play.) “Blame” began to be a word that haunted me. Did I blame my parents? Is this what my play was saying? Over and over I reread my words. I wasn’t blaming them. I was trying to understand what in their own lives made them the way they were and how this affected the lives of their children. I didn’t see this as blame or vengeance.

In fact, I came to see their behavior as destined as my own. I even decided to change the play’s title, which had been
The Furniture of Home
(taken from the same W. H. Auden poem as
The Normal Heart).
I don’t know what sent me to Walt Whitman (beyond the desire to find my title in the words of another gay poet; I wonder now if it was as simple as one aging and physically deteriorating gay writer seeking inspiration from another), but I found myself reading and rereading his collected works. Sure enough, in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” that haunting ode to life without love, I found what I was looking for—”the destiny of me.”

Now I had a play and I had a title and I had a director—Marshall Mason. Then my leading actors, Colleen Dewhurst and Brad Davis, died. I lost my next leading man, Ron Rifkin, because of an unfortunate disagreement I had with the playwright Jon Robin Baitz. Ron, for whom Robbie wrote his greatest role, in
The Substance of Fire,
bowed out. It would be some time before Tanya Berezin of the Circle Repertory Company would read my play in March 1991 and immediately accept it. Like me by the men in my life, my
play had first to have its own history of rejections: by the Public Theater (both Joe Papp and JoAnne Akalaitis), Manhattan Theatre Club, Lincoln Center, Playwrights Horizons (both André Bishop and Don Scardino), American Place Theater, Second Stage, Long Wharf in New Haven, Hartford Stage, Yale Rep (both Lloyd Richards and Stan Wojewodski, Jr.), South Coast Rep in California, the Goodman and Steppenwolf in Chicago, and Circle in the Square on Broadway.

I list these not to either tempt fate (oh, the nightmare possibility of those reviews that begin, “The numerous theaters that turned down Larry Kramer’s new play were wise indeed . . .”) or flaunt my rejections (
The Normal Heart, Faggots,
and my screenplay for
Women in Love
were originally turned down by even larger numbers), but to offer this thought to other writers, and to the little child inside that one talks to: almost more than talent you need tenacity, and an infinite capacity for rejection, if you are to succeed. I still don’t know where you get these, even after writing this play to try to find the answer.

I guess that’s what my play’s about. I guess that’s what my life’s been about.

Not much of a message, huh? Well, maybe it’s about a little more. I’ll have to wait and see. Each day my family surprises me more and more. And that little boy inside me.

I’ll bet you didn’t expect Larry Kramer to talk like this.

I set out to make sense of my life. And I found out that one’s life, particularly
after
one has written about it, doesn’t make sense.
Life
doesn’t make sense.

But change does. And there is no change without tenacity. And change is usually very hard. With precious few gratifications along the way to encourage you to carry on. And some change is good. And necessary. And some change must not be allowed.

This sounds more like Larry Kramer.

Yes, I can make sense out of
this.

You may not agree, and you may not change your opinion, but you will have heard me make my case. And maybe, just maybe, you will think twice before slugging your kid tonight because he or she is gay, or you will not vote for any candidate who would allow AIDS to become a plague.

Yes, I know the possibilities are slim.

So what?

The little boy in me still believes everything is possible.

Mom, you taught me this.

And you lied.

But so does art and so does hope.

This article originally appeared in the
New York Times
Arts & Leisure section on Sunday, October 4, 1992.

O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me,

O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you,

Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,

Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,

Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there in the night,

By the sea under the yellow and sagging moon,

The messenger there arous’d, the fire, the sweet hell within,

The unknown want, the destiny of me.

From
“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”

Walt Whitman

(
NED WEEKS
,
middle-aged, enters a hospital room with his suitcase.
)

NED:
I grew up not far from here. The trees were just being chopped down. To make room for Eden Heights. That’s where we lived. That’s what they named places then.

(
HANNIMAN
,
a nurse, pushes in a cart with medical stuff on it, including
NED’
s records. She is black.
)

HANNIMAN:
The eleventh floor is our floor—Infectious Diseases. We ask that you don’t leave this floor, or the hospital, or the Institute’s grounds, or indeed go to any other floor, where other illnesses are housed. Dr. Della Vida says it’s better to have you on our side. I tell him you’re never going to be on our side. You’re not here to cause some sort of political ruckus? Are you?

NED:
(
Unpacking some books.
) What better time and place to read
The Magic Mountain?

HANNIMAN:
Are you?

NED:
I’m here for you to save my life. Is that too political?

(
DR. ANTHONY DELLA VIDA
enters. He is short, dynamic, handsome, and very smooth, a consummate bureaucrat. He beams hugely and warmly embraces
NED.
)

TONY:
Hello, you monster!

NED:
I never understand why you talk to me . . .

TONY:
I’m very fond of you.

NED:
. . . after all I say about you.

HANNIMAN:
“Dr. Della Vida runs the biggest waste of taxpayers’ money after the Defense Department.” In the
Washington Post.

TONY:
No, in the
Washington Post
he compared me to Hitler.

HANNIMAN:
No, that was in the
Village Voice.
And it was “you fucking son-of-a-bitch of a Hitler.”

TONY:
Where was it he accused me of pulling off the biggest case of scientific fraud since laetrile?

NED:
Vanity Fair.

TONY:
(
Studying
NED’
s file.
) All your numbers are going down pretty consistently. You didn’t listen to me when you should have.

NED:
Ah, Tony, nobody wants to take that shit.

TONY:
They’re wrong.

NED:
It doesn’t work.

TONY:
Nothing works for everybody.

NED:
Nobody believes you.

TONY:
Then why are you here?

NED:
I’m more desperate. And you sold me a bill of goods.