The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me: Two Plays

“Since his screenplay for D. H. Lawrence’s
Women in Love
in 1969, Larry Kramer has been a prophet of psychic health and catastrophe among us—a prophet unmatched for the accuracy of his omens and the reliability of his anathemas and remedies. His uncannily foresighted novel
Faggots
appeared in 1978 just as the AIDS virus flooded whole wings of the American bloodstream; now its Swiftian portrait of an all but vanished subculture stands as that culture’s visible memorial. His later plays have been clear as firebells, memorable as tracer bullets.”—The American Academy of Arts and Letters citation, May 1996

Praise for
The Normal Heart

“The blood that’s coursing through
The Normal Heart
is boiling hot. There can be little doubt that it is the most outspoken play around.”—Frank Rich,
The New York Times

“Kramer’s astounding drama about AIDS is too urgent to ignore! An astounding drama. . . a damning indictment of a nation in the middle of an epidemic with its head in the sand. It will make your hair stand on end even as the tears spurt from your eyes. Dynamite!”—Liz Smith,
New York Daily News

“Wired with anger, electric with rage. . . Powerful stuff.”—
The Boston Globe

“No one who cares about the future of the human race can afford to miss
The Normal Heart.”
—Rex Reed

“The Normal Hearthas
broken a great silence. . . . It has put politics and journalism to shame for the cover-up of a major disaster and one of the great moral dramas of our time.”—Frances FitzGerald, author of
Fire in the Lake

“Impassioned writing . . . explosively powerful. . . uniquely important.”
—The Advocate

“I haven’t been this involved—
upset
—in too damn long. Kramer honors us with this stormy, articulate theatrical work.”—Harold Prince

“Larry Kramer’s
The Normal Heart
is arguably the best political play of that schizophrenic decade and definitely the definitive dramatic exploration of the early years of the AIDS crisis.”—
Chicago Tribune

“Larry Kramer’s 1988 masterwork refuses to date.”—
Chicago Reader

“Kramer’s play actually may work better now in the tragic hindsight of history.”—
Chicago Sun-Times.

Praise for
The Destiny of Me

“Searing!”—
Vanity Fair

“Gives new hope to the American theater. One of the year’s ten best. . . Poignant, most moving, enriching.”—
Time

“Overwhelmingly powerful. . . scaldingly honest. . . a seismic jolt of visceral theatricality!”—Frank Rich,
The New York Times

“A harrowing, emotionally naked family-memory-AIDS play, playful and moving, personable and disturbing, with scenes of devastating counterpoint. The work of a theater artist. . . like Arthur Miller at his best.”—
Newsday

“Driven by a fierce honesty and searing pain, Kramer’s emotional and moral urgency fills
The Destiny of Me
with irresistible human truth.”—
Newsweek

“A mature work by a gifted American playwright in his prime . . . bitter and angry and full of biting humor.”—
The Wall Street Journal

“The Destiny of Me
is bigger than any one of us. The
Long Day’s Journey
comparisons are apt. At long last Kramer the activist has leashed in Kramer the polemicist, letting loose Kramer the artist.”—
QW

“The Destiny of Me
is a beautiful, somber play, very mature, and very personal. Plays are meant for presentation. Great plays also stand well as great literature. This is one of them. Kramer proves once again his place as one of the best writers of our times.”—
Lambda Book Report

The Normal Heart
and
The Destiny of Me

By Larry Kramer

Fiction

Faggots

Plays

Sissies’ Scrapbook

The Normal Heart

Just Say No

The Destiny of Me

Screenplay

Women in Love

Nonfiction

Reports from the holocaust: the story of an AIDS activist

Two plays by Larry Kramer

With a Foreword by Tony Kushner

This collection copyright © 2000 by Larry Kramer

Introduction copyright © 2000 by Tony Kushner

The Normal Heart
copyright ©1985 by Larry Kramer

The Destiny of Me
copyright © 1993 by Larry Kramer

Foreword to
The Normal Heart
copyright © 1985 by Joseph Papp

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that
The Normal Heart
and
The Destiny of Me
are subject to a royalty. They are fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and all British Commonwealth countries, and all countries covered by the International Copyright Union, the Pan-American Copyright Convention, and the Universal Copyright Convention. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound taping, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying, and rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved.

All inquiries concerning English language stock and amateur applications to perform them, must be made in advance, before rehearsals begin, with Samuel French, 45 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10010. First-class professional applications for permission to perform them, and those other rights stated above, for all plays in this volume must be made in advance to Tom Erhardt, Casarotto Ramsay, National House, 36 Queen Anne’s Gate, London SW1H 9AS.

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

The credits appearing on page 253 constitute an extension of the copyright page.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kramer, Larry.

The normal heart; and, The destiny of me / Larry Kramer.

    p. cm.

ISBN-10: 0-8021-3692-3

ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-3692-3

1. AIDS (Disease)—Patients—Drama. 2. Gay men—Drama. I. Title: Normal heart; and, The destiny of me. II. Kramer, Larry. Destiny of me. III. Title: Destiny of me. IV. Title.

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Grove Press

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New York, NY 10003

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Foreword

The Normal Heart

The Destiny of Me

Here are two plays that, taken together, offer a persuasive account of a critical, terrible era when an emergent community, laboring to set itself free from centuries of persecution and oppression, was blindsided just at the moment of a political and cultural attainment of some of its most important goals by a biological horror miserably allied to the world’s murderous indifference, its masked and its naked hatred. From the time of their first theatrical productions, every concerned, engaged person has had to address, to laud or deplore, to argue and contend with, Larry Kramer’s portrayal of the period. The plays are now part of our history, beyond forgetting.

Kramer, not understanding that theater had ceased to be newsworthy, wrote a play that made news, made a difference, had an effect—not to win prizes or encomia in the press, nor to set the box office ablaze, but to catalyze his society, which we all know theater can’t do anymore, except on the rare occasions when it does, as when Larry Kramer wrote
The Normal Heart.

The Normal Heart
and
The Destiny of Me
need no introduction because they are accessible to any reader. You don’t need permission; don’t even knock, just
enter.
You will know immediately that you have been awaited impatiently; you will know immediately where you are and how to proceed. Guides aren’t necessary. The
plays are shockingly, uncomfortably, almost embarrassingly direct. They contain hidden depths and complexities, to be sure, but in both plays beats one great heart aflame with one grand overwhelming desire: to use dramatic literature and the stage to get at truth, at
a
truth, at one truth of these times—and not a metaphysical truth, not an abstracted principle of existence (though these are, in the process, uncovered), but rather truth as Marx understood it, truth that springs from and returns to action, truth engaged with practice,
praxis,
truth that is shaped by and shapes lived experience, truth that is changed by and changes the world.

The ardency of Kramer’s longing for truth is most evident in the language he employs, which is startlingly plain. Although the plays’ titles are found in lines of verse by two great poets, W. H. Auden and Walt Whitman, these dramas are remarkably non-poetical, almost antipoetical. Each text has precisely one, and only one symbolic, metaphoric moment which gains much of its power from its absolute isolation. Both moments—the spilled milk in
The Normal Heart,
the spilled blood in
The Destiny of Me
—are actions, stage images; neither is a figure of speech, of language. The writing avoids metaphor, avoids all painterliness. It is governed by a stark, unyielding economy, pressed by a urgent need to find answers and understanding—as pressed by need as the playwright, his protagonist, and the community to which they belong, for which they feel such love and such anger, are pressed to find a cure for AIDS.

The poem that concludes the English-language edition of Bertolt Brecht’s
Collected Poems,
“And I Always Thought,” could serve as a credo for Kramer’s playwriting:

And I always thought: the very simplest words

Must be enough. When I say what things are like

Everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds.

That you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for yourself

Surely you see that.

As in Kramer, so too in much of Brecht: the few instances of metaphor in the writing ring like perfectly cast bells (usually of alarm), precisely because of their scarcity. The ear of the listener, having been opened by the playwright to the logic and rhythms of exigent, functional speech, the speech of crisis, emergency, danger, receives metaphor as an exceptional occurrence, avidly, with heightened attention. This is the way classical writers, the best Greeks and Romans, Aeschylus and Horace, use metaphor: sparingly, with severe discipline. It is a canny technique, but it is much more than a technique. This precision and harshness is the soul of an art that seeks truth through clarity of vision, an art that rejects comfort, ornament, luxury as unnecessary and probably dangerous distractions. Walter Benjamin writes:

The talent of a good writer is to make use of his style to supply his thought with a spectacle of the kind provided by a well-trained body. He never says more than he has thought. Hence, his writing redounds not. . . to his own benefit, but solely to the benefit of what he wants to say.