THEATRE REVIEW:
THE NORMAL HEART
17 OCT/11

JOHN COULBOURN,
QMI Agency
R: 5/5

Pictured: Sarah Orenstein, Jonathan Wilson

TORONTO - Imagine a snowflake trying to warn of an impending avalanche — or more appropriately, a single salt water tear attempting to raise the alarm in the encroaching waves of a killer tsunami.

That’s how activist-turned-playwright Larry Kramer must have seen himself in the early ’80s as gay men, his friends and lovers, started dying from a mysterious ailment in New York. In response, Kramer started the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, which would go on to become one of the leaders in the fight against a disease we now know as AIDS. But in the process, the incandescent Kramer would alienate so many, both straight and gay, that he would be forced out of the organization he founded, just as it was beginning to have an effect.

Kramer’s struggle is documented in his 1985 play, THE NORMAL HEART, a thinly disguised autobiography initially dismissed by some as self-serving and polemical, even while it enjoyed significant success. A quarter of a century on, it certainly seems a lot less so, in a new production that opened Sunday at Buddies in Bad Times, a production of Studio 180 in association with BIBT.

Presented in the round, under the direction of Joel Greenberg, THE NORMAL HEART starts quietly, but quickly moves into edgy territory as Kramer’s doppelganger — a gay writer by the name of Ned Weeks (Jonathan Wilson) drops by a clinic run by Dr. Emma Brookner (Sarah Orenstein) to discuss a recent wave of unexplained deaths within the New York gay community. The year is 1981.

What he learns from the doctor, (aside from, in Sunday’s opening, that Mom was right about never leaving home without clean underwear), coupled with his own concerns about the promiscuity within the recently liberated gay community compels Weeks to attempt to try to raise a meaningful call to arms. But while his concern about the rising tide of illness and death proves him prescient, it also puts him at odds, when coupled with his confrontational nature, with pretty much everyone with whom he comes into contact.

And as the numbers increase, so does his frustration with the apathy within the gay community and the antipathy in the broader community. His war with the establishment, represented off-stage by then-New York mayor, Edward Koch, and onstage by his lawyer brother (played by John Bourgeois), and with his fellow gays (Paul Essiembre as the closeted Bruce Niles, Ryan Kelly as Mickey Marcus and Jonathan Seinen as Tommy Boatwright) escalates at just about the same rate as his new relationship with journalist Felix Turner, played by Jeff Miller. Not surprisingly, tragedy — personal, interpersonal and finally, global — ensues.

Greenberg has once again created a strong ensemble that includes Mark Crawford and Mark McGrinder in a handful of supporting roles. Sure, one might quibble with individual performances — the talented but ever-affable Wilson makes Weeks’ most vicious tirades almost charming, further unbalancing a script that even the playwright might admit is already self-serving.

But taken as a whole, this is a stellar company, capable of sifting through the statistics and the polemic that Kramer packs into his script and shaping it into something that feels awfully close to living history. Which is, of course, what it is. In its documentation of the early shift that carried the gay community out from a hidden role within society that was almost exclusively social/sexual into an active and activist mainstream role, THE NORMAL HEART could be considered a sort of gay Birth of a Nation. But most of all, it is just damn good theatre — the kind that can still drive you to fury even while every normal heart in the joint is clearly breaking.