Theatre in Review: The Normal Heart (Golden Theatre) There are, I am sure, more finely written or elegantly constructed plays in town than The Normal Heart, but if a single production comes near to matching its sheer pile-driver force, I don't know about it. Larry Kramer's drama of the early AIDS era, baring its fury on Broadway for the first time, retains every bit of its savage, denunciatory power after 26 years. Interestingly, as time goes by, it appears to be a much more cogent work than anyone ever wanted to admit -- and, in certain respects, it seems almost prophetic. Because it was written in a white hot fury, and because it explicitly condemned the Koch administration, the federal government, and the gay community itself for failing to halt the progress of AIDS, The Normal Heart was, all too often, relegated to the second-tier shelf where the agitprop dramas are kept. Many considered it to be not a play but a screed -- a powerful and a necessary one, but a screed nonetheless. And, in truth, when I saw the Public Theatre revival in 2004, it seemed to me a case of a creakily assembled first act redeemed by a second act full of arias so powerful that they simply erased any objections. This may still be true, but the current production, originally staged by Joel Grey for a benefit performance and refined for a Broadway run by George C. Wolfe, makes a strong case for The Normal Heart being one of the best plays of the 1980s. You have to admire the skill and economy with which Kramer puts his reluctant hero (and alter ego) Ned Weeks into the thick of it, as, egged on by the Cassandra-like Dr. Emma Brookner (who is deeply alarmed by the dozens of dying young men coming to her office), he becomes a crusader for medical research and an advocate of sexual abstinence. (It's the beginning of the epidemic, before the identification of the HIV virus, and no one understands how the disease is transmitted.) As Ned does battle with gay community leaders who don't want to hear the bad news, Kramer deftly interweaves scenes showing Ned's growing involvement with Felix, a New York Times Style Section editor, allowing us to see a softer side of his embattled character. There's no such thing as private happiness in The Norman Heart, however, as more and more young men expire, wasted by weight loss, night sweats, and purple lesions. And, as Ned tries ever more frantically to prod timid bureaucrats and skeptical activists into taking decisive action, Kramer shows, in graphic detail, how Ned's relentlessness, his inability to compromise, and his take-no-prisoners style doom his efforts to mobilize the world against AIDS. (Having established Gay Men's Health Crisis, which provides information and care for AIDS patients, Ned wants to confront the government and medical establishment, an option that terrifies most of his allies.) His failure has devastating personal consequences, as Felix becomes sick and undergoes a terrible decline. However Grey and Wolfe collaborated, the company they have assembled works briskly and unsentimentally in one galvanizing scene after another. Joe Mantello, returning to acting for the first time in a decade and a half, adulterates Ned's rage with self-deprecating humor and real tenderness, but, when required to say what he really feels to an obstructive city official or to a lover who is swiftly losing his will to live, he deploys his words with the force of daggers. As Felix, John Benjamin Hickey declines before our eyes, his shrunken, wraithlike appearance in the later scenes almost too awful to see. Also providing superlative work are Patrick Breen as an early GMHC activist driven to a breakdown by the avalanche of deaths; Mark Harelik as Ned's steadfast brother, who is stunned to find himself accused of homophobia; Lee Pace as the closeted gay businessman and community leader who constantly butts heads with Ned; Jim Parsons as the self-styled "Southern bitch" who tries to hold his fractious colleagues together; and Richard Topol as a representative of the mayor's office who doesn't take kindly to having his motives questioned. In a class by herself is Ellen Barkin as Emma, her blunt, needling manner making her something of a female Ned Weeks. In the play's most electrifying scene, she confronts the board of her hospital, indicting their timidity and moral sloth, finally hurling he patients' files at her colleagues in a gesture of bottomless contempt. The action unfolds on David Rockwell's elegantly conceived white box of a set, the walls covered with key words and phrases of the era in a manner that resembles raised type. The words are highlighted at times by either David Weiner's lighting or Batwin + Robin's projections -- I can't be sure who is responsible -- but I wish this effect had been deployed more strongly. Anyway, Weiner's lighting cannily carves the actors out of the space, and the projections supply valuable reminders of the period's anything-goes sexual ethos; they also provide stark expositions of the constantly rising numbers of the dead. Martin Pakledinaz's costumes and David Van Tieghem's sound are both typically first-rate. Seen today, one is struck by the play's strong subtheme focusing on the importance of marriage in giving dignity and legitimacy to gay relationships. The climactic scene, in which Ned marries the dying Felix, remains one of the most searing sequences in modern drama. At the time of its writing, it seemed an impossibly romantic idea, an unattainable dream. Now, marriage equality is the major hot-button issue in the gay community; we have it in five states and the District of Columbia, and New York may be the next to get on board. It's just another reason why The Normal Heart remains a vital and living piece of drama.--David Barbour 
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