The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me

Two Plays

Larry Kramer

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781555846688
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Drama
• Index: Literature

Two award-winning plays from the legendary activist and dramatist who has been called "one of the best writers of our times." ( Lambda Book Report ) The Normal Heart, set during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, is the impassioned indictment of a society that allowed the plague to happen, a moving denunciation of the ignorance and fear that helped kill an entire generation. It has been produced and taught all over the world. Its companion play, The Destiny of Me is the stirring story of an AIDs activist forced to put his life in the hands of the very doctor he has been denouncing. The Normal Heart was selected as one of the 100 Greatest Plays of the Twentieth Century by the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain The Destiny of Me was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a double Obie winner, and the recipient of the Lucille Lortel Award for Best Play of the Year. Introduction by Tony Kushner. "Wired with anger, electric with rage.... Powerful stuff." — The Boston Globe

The Destiny of Me

A Play in Three Acts

About the Production

As with all plays, I hope there are many ways to design The Destiny of Me.

The original New York production turned out to be much more elaborate than I’d conceived it in my head as I wrote it. As I worked with the director, Marshall Mason, I began to fear I’d written an undesignable play (not that there should ever be such a thing!).

On The Normal Heart I’d had the talent of the enormously gifted Eugene Lee, ever adept at solving problems of this nature in miraculously ingenious ways, and ways that were not expensive. I suspect that Eugene’s design for The Normal Heart—-the way he solved not dissimilar problems—has been utilized unknowingly all over the world, just from the participants in one production seeing photographs of another.

This time, and it was also a great gift, I had the opportunity to work with John Lee Beatty, who’d designed many of Marshall’s other productions. John Lee is another kind of theatrical genius, as obsessed with minute details as Eugene is off-the-cuff. Our set was a realistic, technical marvel, with the scenes from the past zipping in and out on clever winches. We even had a sink on stage, with running water, so that the doctors and nurses and orderlies who were constantly coming into the hospital environment could wash their hands, as they would in a real hospital.

The elaborate apparatus for the medical treatment Ned is undergoing, as well as everything having to do with blood, was also worked out meticulously. I have not, in this published version, completely detailed all this medical minutiae, or the comings and goings of the nonspeaking hospital staff that the availability of a group of young Circle Rep interns allowed us to utilize in peopling our stage. Nor have I gone into too much detail about how the blood machinery looked and worked, beyond cursory descriptions.

I guess what I’m saying, and hoping, is that a lot of inventive ways will be found to deal with any problems designing and producing my play might raise—that there is no right way, and that, as in all theater, imagination is also one of the actors, and there are many ways to play the part.

A note about the songs Alexander sings to taunt his father in Act I: it is not essential that these be the particular songs, so long as the songs used are from this era, which is the end of World War II.

There are, for instance, a great many other Andrews Sisters’ songs, available now on numerous CDs. I happen to be very fond of ‘Victory Polka,’ but it’s hard to locate the Time-Life Music CDs that contain the only recording I know of it (the second CD or fourth cassette of the album: ‘V-Disc, The Songs that Went to War, World War I Fiftieth Anniversary Collector’s Edition’).

The South Pacific songs are available on both the original Broadway cast recording or the soundtrack album of the film. The songs from Show Boat (’Where’s the Mate For Me’ and ‘Make Believe’) as well as the brief exchange of dialogue are best represented on the complete EMI Show Boat (CD 7491082) or (my favourite) on the soundtrack from the MGM film, Till the Clouds Roll By (Sony CD AK 47029).

Introduction

I began arranging for the production of The Destiny of Me when I thought I was shortly going to die. It’s a play I’ve been working on for years—one of those “family” slash “memory” plays I suspect most playwrights feel compelled at some point to try their hand at in a feeble attempt, before it’s too late, to find out what their lives have been all about. I figured it would be the last words of this opinionated author.

Not only did I think my play would be done while I was on my deathbed or after, I decided I would definitely leave word that it would not be done while my mother, who is now approaching ninety-three, was still alive. I certainly didn’t want to be around to discover how she would react to the portrayal, by her fifty-seven-year-old homosexual son, of some fifty years of her life.

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 alo...