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rfmcdonaldIf I had been alone I would have moaned out loud the Saturday evening the day before the play, at a quarter after six at Buddies in Bad Times theatre on 12 Alexander Street, when I heard the ticket agent in her booth say to the man who had walked just a couple of steps ahead of me that there was only one advance ticket left for Studio 180 Theatre's production of Larry Kramer's 1985 HIV/AIDS play The Normal Heart the next afternoon at 2:30. I'd postponed booking a ticket days in advance, thinking I could just go to TOTix late Saturday afternoon and buy a ticket to that evening's performance or to the next day's. Would I miss the show?
No, I didn't. The man in front of me didn't want to pay the full $C30 for an advance ticket, instead accepting the comfort of knowing that if he arrived early enough the next morning he'd be able to buy a ticket at the door with whatever he'd offer. He left, I advanced, exhaled, and passed over the Visa gift card.
The Normal Heart got quite a lot of coverage in the local media, at Torontoist and The Globe and Mail and the National Post and NOW Toronto and Xtra! among others. In this the thirtieth anniversary of the recognized HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States--the first report of AIDS in Canada was in 1982--Kramer's play documenting the early epidemic has come to everyone's attention against. South of the border, there has been a very successful staging on Broadway, for instance. The decision of Studio 180, a theatrical group concerned with socially engaged theatre, to stage The Normal Heart was well-timed.
The narrative is something I recognized, since The Normal Heart is very much an autobiographical play describing the experiences of Kramer and his friends fighting AIDS in New York City in the first half of the 1980s. The events of the play were described in Randy Shilts' decidedly non-fiction history And the Band Played On. In San Francisco, the city government and local health institutions engaged fairly quickly with the epidemic; in New York City, a straightened and hostile city government and distracted local health institutions tried to dismiss the epidemic, aided the epidemic's spread and much misery. (I think that Kramer's contention that then-mayor Ed Koch is closeted is defensible.) The characters are more-or-less transparent restagings of actual people. The angry and engaged writer Ned Weeks who creates the anti-AIDS community organizatiion is the alter ego of the playwright himself; Emma Brookner, the doctor condemned to a wheelchair by polio (three months before the Salk vaccine, as she says) who treats the first cases and gets Weeks to do something, is Linda Laubenstein; Bruce Niles, the handsome if closeted bank executive who's elected president of the organization because of his affability and--yes--handsomeness-- is Paul Popham; Mickey Marcus, the city health employee who moonlights in the fight against the epidemic and has a breakdown under the pressure of not knowing what's going on and if his advice is lethally wrong, is Lawrence Mass; Tommy Boatwright, the suave flirtatious Southerner who keeps the organization moving past its internal personality conflicts, is Rodger McFarlane. I don't know if Felix Turner, the closeted New York Times society writer who falls into love with weeks only to die, has an identifiable real-life parallel, but I don't think it necessarily has to; he's an excellent synecdoche, a stand-in for everyone who has been lost.
Is The Normal Heart a good play? After seeing the performance, and due consideration, I think so. Kramer wrote The Normal Heart with the political intent of getting people mobilized to do something about HIV/AIDS, and the play does that, humanizing the victims of the epidemic and the people they live. I'd been afraid that the play, drawn from Kramer's own conflictual history with the Gay Men's Health Crisis, would burnish Kramer's role too much and denigrate his opponents in the organization, but he avoided that; in the play, if not in life, Kramer recognized exactly why his colleagues pushed him out of the organization, for his politically unhelpful and often personally hurtful combativeness. The Normal Heart, necessarily, is also a play concerned with legitimizing homosexuality as normal, with introducing the idea that gay romance is intrinsically no different from straight romance. (I may be biased on this second count, particularly.) Kramer succeeded, his play overcoming the othering imposed on HIV/AIDS victims and queer men simply by portraying HIV/AIDS as a deadly disease first and foremost and presenting the characters involved in same-sex relationships and the relationships themselves as normal. Weeks' angry monologue to his brother, demanding that his brother see his orientation and his relationship not as a case of adapting as best as he could to Freudian childhood traumas, but rather as things morally and functionally indistinguishable from his brother's own heterosexuality and heteorsexuality, got standing applause.
Was the performance of The Normal Heart I saw a good one? Unquestionably. Joel Greenberg's direction was fluid, and his set was good and simple, a gridwork of squares surrounded by the audience's bleachers-style seating, upon which sets--hospital beds, chairs--were easily wheeled on and off, period disco music playing between scenes. The actors were uniformly quite, quite good--it was interesting to see Ryan Kelly, star of in this summer's HIV-themed Toronto Fringe musical Living With Henry, act a different role at the epidemic's beginning, Sarah Orenstein's Emma Brookner is fully engaged, and Jonathan Wilson is perfect as the conflicted and conflictual but still ultimately appealing Ned Weeks. It was a superb performance.
If I'm to see drama, in short, what I saw on Sunday the 30th is exactly the calibre of drama I'd like to see.
No, I didn't. The man in front of me didn't want to pay the full $C30 for an advance ticket, instead accepting the comfort of knowing that if he arrived early enough the next morning he'd be able to buy a ticket at the door with whatever he'd offer. He left, I advanced, exhaled, and passed over the Visa gift card.
The Normal Heart got quite a lot of coverage in the local media, at Torontoist and The Globe and Mail and the National Post and NOW Toronto and Xtra! among others. In this the thirtieth anniversary of the recognized HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States--the first report of AIDS in Canada was in 1982--Kramer's play documenting the early epidemic has come to everyone's attention against. South of the border, there has been a very successful staging on Broadway, for instance. The decision of Studio 180, a theatrical group concerned with socially engaged theatre, to stage The Normal Heart was well-timed.
The narrative is something I recognized, since The Normal Heart is very much an autobiographical play describing the experiences of Kramer and his friends fighting AIDS in New York City in the first half of the 1980s. The events of the play were described in Randy Shilts' decidedly non-fiction history And the Band Played On. In San Francisco, the city government and local health institutions engaged fairly quickly with the epidemic; in New York City, a straightened and hostile city government and distracted local health institutions tried to dismiss the epidemic, aided the epidemic's spread and much misery. (I think that Kramer's contention that then-mayor Ed Koch is closeted is defensible.) The characters are more-or-less transparent restagings of actual people. The angry and engaged writer Ned Weeks who creates the anti-AIDS community organizatiion is the alter ego of the playwright himself; Emma Brookner, the doctor condemned to a wheelchair by polio (three months before the Salk vaccine, as she says) who treats the first cases and gets Weeks to do something, is Linda Laubenstein; Bruce Niles, the handsome if closeted bank executive who's elected president of the organization because of his affability and--yes--handsomeness-- is Paul Popham; Mickey Marcus, the city health employee who moonlights in the fight against the epidemic and has a breakdown under the pressure of not knowing what's going on and if his advice is lethally wrong, is Lawrence Mass; Tommy Boatwright, the suave flirtatious Southerner who keeps the organization moving past its internal personality conflicts, is Rodger McFarlane. I don't know if Felix Turner, the closeted New York Times society writer who falls into love with weeks only to die, has an identifiable real-life parallel, but I don't think it necessarily has to; he's an excellent synecdoche, a stand-in for everyone who has been lost.
Is The Normal Heart a good play? After seeing the performance, and due consideration, I think so. Kramer wrote The Normal Heart with the political intent of getting people mobilized to do something about HIV/AIDS, and the play does that, humanizing the victims of the epidemic and the people they live. I'd been afraid that the play, drawn from Kramer's own conflictual history with the Gay Men's Health Crisis, would burnish Kramer's role too much and denigrate his opponents in the organization, but he avoided that; in the play, if not in life, Kramer recognized exactly why his colleagues pushed him out of the organization, for his politically unhelpful and often personally hurtful combativeness. The Normal Heart, necessarily, is also a play concerned with legitimizing homosexuality as normal, with introducing the idea that gay romance is intrinsically no different from straight romance. (I may be biased on this second count, particularly.) Kramer succeeded, his play overcoming the othering imposed on HIV/AIDS victims and queer men simply by portraying HIV/AIDS as a deadly disease first and foremost and presenting the characters involved in same-sex relationships and the relationships themselves as normal. Weeks' angry monologue to his brother, demanding that his brother see his orientation and his relationship not as a case of adapting as best as he could to Freudian childhood traumas, but rather as things morally and functionally indistinguishable from his brother's own heterosexuality and heteorsexuality, got standing applause.
Was the performance of The Normal Heart I saw a good one? Unquestionably. Joel Greenberg's direction was fluid, and his set was good and simple, a gridwork of squares surrounded by the audience's bleachers-style seating, upon which sets--hospital beds, chairs--were easily wheeled on and off, period disco music playing between scenes. The actors were uniformly quite, quite good--it was interesting to see Ryan Kelly, star of in this summer's HIV-themed Toronto Fringe musical Living With Henry, act a different role at the epidemic's beginning, Sarah Orenstein's Emma Brookner is fully engaged, and Jonathan Wilson is perfect as the conflicted and conflictual but still ultimately appealing Ned Weeks. It was a superb performance.
If I'm to see drama, in short, what I saw on Sunday the 30th is exactly the calibre of drama I'd like to see.
