TT: Song of himself

In the second of three drama columns for this week’s Wall Street Journal, I review the Broadway revival of The Normal Heart. Here’s an excerpt.
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The way in which you respond to the Broadway revival of “The Normal Heart,” Larry Kramer’s play about the early years of the AIDS epidemic, may depend on how old you were in 1985, when it was first seen Off Broadway. Those who are too young to remember when AIDS was laying waste to a generation of gay men could well be stunned into submission by the unremitting ferocity of “The Normal Heart.” But now that AIDS has become a chronic condition rather than a death sentence, Mr. Kramer’s play must stand on its artistic merits, not its impassioned sincerity. How does it hold up? Better than I expected, but not as well as I’d hoped.
“The Normal Heart” is an autobiographical play whose hero, Ned Weeks (Joe Mantello), is Mr. Kramer’s fictional stand-in. Like the real Larry Kramer, Ned is a furiously angry gay writer who likes nothing better than an argument, and when his friends start to sicken and die from a mysterious ailment, he starts an organization (Gay Men’s Health Crisis, though it is never named in the play) whose purpose is to help them cope and draw attention to their plight. But Ned is so abrasive that he alienates most of his friends and colleagues, and when his lover (John Benjamin Hickey) becomes infected with the AIDS virus, the combined stress pushes him over the edge….
Too much of “The Normal Heart,” alas, is given over to speech-making, and the intimate scenes in which we see the characters living their lives rather than talking about them are so involving and persuasive that the table-pounding becomes all the more regrettable by contrast. An even bigger problem with “The Normal Heart” is that it is self-aggrandizing to an astonishing degree: Mr. Kramer portrays himself as a flawed but ultimately heroic figure, a kind of secular Moses, and the fact that he really did make a historic contribution to the fight against AIDS doesn’t make the portrayal any easier to swallow without gagging….
It helps greatly that Mr. Mantello, who is vastly better known these days as a director but who starred in the original Broadway production of “Angels in America,” is giving one of the best performances of the season, on or Off Broadway. He doesn’t do anything fancy, nor does he hungrily solicit the audience’s sympathy: Instead he plays Ned with a simplicity and straightforwardness that makes him fully understandable….
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Read the whole thing here.