The Normal Heart (NHB Modern Plays): (National Theatre edition)

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 Anger

David 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