With regard to the AIDS plague, Larry Kramer was a first responder. In 1982, when the Centers for Disease Control acknowledged that gay men were dying in epidemic numbers from a “cancer” no one yet understood, Kramer ran toward the fire, as they say, rather than from it. He became what a colleague from the period calls “the principal and guiding force behind the establishment of Gay Men’s Health Crisis,” a Manhattan-based organization that still provides counseling and legal support. Five years later, frustrated with GMHC’s political reticence in an environment where President Reagan and New York mayor Ed Koch ignored AIDS except to demonize its victims, the notoriously argumentative Kramer instigated the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, whose famous slogan was “Silence = Death.”
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There’s no denying that The Normal Heart was a pioneering piece of work—as important, in its way, as any of Kramer’s other achievements, since it helped put AIDS right under the nose of a culture that was just as happy either to forget about it or think of it a fair price for gay immorality. (Pat Buchanan, 1983: “The poor homosexuals. They have declared war on nature and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.”) When The Normal Heart premiered at the Public Theater in 1985, it was—along with William Hoffman’s As Is—one of the first shows to look at the epidemic from the point of view of those whose lives were being devastated by it.
The question is, do “pioneering” and “important” necessarily equal good?
That may not be good politics, but it creates the possibility of a very juicy performance. David Cromer never gets at the juice, though. His Weeks is initially so diffident that we don’t believe him when he says he frightens others away. Later, his big, angry speeches come off as not much more than a lot of yelling. It doesn’t help that, saddled with a shallow stage, director Nick Bowling has Cromer doing almost all his acting in profile. We hardly ever get to see both his eyes at once.
Through 12/22: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 4 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM Stage 773 1225 W. Belmont 773-327-5252timelinetheatre.com $37-$50
