Theatre is written for its time, and on occasion we get something written in fire that turns out to have lasting value. Here's my @denverpost review of #LarryKramer’s #TheNormalHeart, when it was finally staged on Broadway in 2011. Anyone hear the drumbeats echoing? @EllenBarkin 
By John Moore
"The Normal Heart," Larry Kramer's 1985, fact-based AIDS polemic, may be the angriest play since "Medea." Actor Joe Mantello paces throughout like a rabid dog, his right hand almost always glued inside his jacket pocket as if concealing a gun he's about to unload...
"The Normal Heart," Larry Kramer's 1985, fact-based AIDS polemic, may be the angriest play since "Medea." Actor Joe Mantello paces throughout like a rabid dog, his right hand almost always glued inside his jacket pocket as if concealing a gun he's about to unload...
on everyone in attendance. But the words he spits out do the job quite nicely on their own. Kramer exonerates no one from allowing the worst plague in 80 years to go all but unchallenged between 1981-84. Not Ronald Reagan, The New York Times or the medical community....
And not the largely oblivious or closeted gay community that he portrays as ignoring the crisis for self-serving purposes. All of which (and more) let the virus gestate into a killer of 35 million and counting. Mantello plays Kramer's alter ego - an accidental AIDS activist...
at the start of the political movement that turned frightened and helpless gay New Yorkers into a bellicose army - only with no one listening to their battle cries while friends dropped around them, first in a trickle and eventually by the dozens. Crisply directed by Joel Grey,
this is visceral, raw and heartbreaking theater that feels nothing like a 26-year-old diatribe that's only now making it to a Broadway stage. It's laced with sweetness and elegant, furious castigations - one by Broadway newcomer Ellen Barkin...
(ironically, as a polio-crippled doctor) that brings the play to a halt and the audience to its feet. The words may be time-stamped, but there's nothing dated about theater that feels this cathartic and alive. And with Kramer himself there most nights handing out fliers with...
current stats, it's plain the fight against AIDS is far from over.
Quotable: "Maybe if they let us get married in the first place, none of this would have happened."
Quotable: "Maybe if they let us get married in the first place, none of this would have happened."
Larry Kramer may be dead, but he will never rest in peace. He rests in anger.
Photo by Benedict Evans.
Photo by Benedict Evans.
