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| BROADWAY REVIEW ROUND-UP: 16 links and excerpts for “The Normal Heart” | |
| Posted by: | jesse21 08:57 am EDT 04/28/11 |
| - Larry Kramer’s 26-year-old play, The Normal Heart, finally made its debut on Broadway at the Broadhurst Theatre last night. It is a triumph! The reviews are excellent, most of them raves. The entire cast received high praise, particularly Joe Mantello, Ellen Barkin (also making her Broadway debut) and John Benjamin Hickey. Is there a lone wolf out there, a critic focusing on negatives? Yes there is, and it is none other than Terry Teachout of The Wall Street Journal. I placed the link to his review at the bottom of this page for easy reference. For those who have not as yet read the letter Larry Kramer and his volunteers are handing theatergoers as they exit the play, I provide a link. Click here. Here then are links to and excerpts from 16 reviews: Kramer’s watershed drama from 1985 — an indictment of a world unwilling to confront the epidemic that would come to be known as AIDS — blasts you like an open, overstoked furnace. Your eyes are pretty much guaranteed to start stinging before the first act is over, and by the play’s end even people who think they have no patience for polemical theater may find their resistance has melted into tears. No, make that sobs. . . . The crisis depicted so vividly here is far from ended, as cases of AIDS continue to multiply internationally. And lest you leave this play thinking that you’ve had only a great cathartic night at the theater, fliers from Mr. Kramer are being handed out after the show (by Mr. Kramer himself on occasion), explaining how incomplete the fight against AIDS remains. Read one and take heed. But remember that the man who wrote it also wrote a far better play than you might have thought.” Period. That's a testament to the cast and directors Joel Grey, who staged the fall readings, and George C. Wolfe, who joined this team for the play's Broadway debut. . . . Tugging at his sweater and forever fidgeting, Joe Mantello not only summons the jangled nerves and manic energy that drive Ned, but locates and exposes the insecure heart beneath the man's raging exterior. He's outstanding. His co-stars match him. In her Broadway debut, Ellen Barkin seethes with fire and ice as a pioneering AIDS doc, while John Benjamin Hickey brings touching tenderness as the doomed Felix. . . . The walls of David Rockwell's boxy, white set are covered in writing (i.e., "Patient Zero"). It's an allusion to the original production at the Public Theater in 1985. Back then, "The Normal Heart" was a raging, wailing wakeup call. Now it's a look back, a period piece. But one with the power to make you wince and weep.” “Over a quarter-century later, Larry Kramer's landmark AIDS drama remains an all-too-necessary piece of propaganda art by the fiercest canary in the AIDS mine. As Broadway is finally getting to see, however, this Off-Broadway legend is also riveting theater, pulsing with characters who stay with us as much for their humanity as their function in the conflict. What once seemed like a sectarian story line about factions within the gay community has, with time, taken on the gripping if unwieldy moral heft of a monument by Arthur Miller. . . . Where Raúl Esparza made a charismatic Ned in the excellent 2004 Off-Broadway revival, Joe Mantello is a febrile, nerdy, twitchy guy who cannot help wearing his nervous system on the outside. The actor is matched, thunderbolt for thunderbolt, by Ellen Barkin as the appalled doctor, partially paralyzed by polio and overwhelmed both by her dying patients and the country's apathy. . . . As much as I admired [Larry Kramer’s] fury in '85, I remember wondering if he wasn't, perhaps, a little paranoid in his need to affix blame to a nightmare. These days, it is clear he was a prophet. Bottom Line: Essential history, riveting theater.” that includes Joe Mantello, Ellen Barkin and Jim Parsons, "The Normal Heart" hasn't lost any of its anger or biting humor, but it feels more like a fascinating time capsule. There still isn't a cure for AIDS, so the stakes remain high. But along with its militant content, the show's also a portrait -- sometimes self-serving -- of a specific man in a specific time and place. It's a snapshot of a city and era that feel long gone, and this production, co-directed by Joel Grey and George C. Wolfe, gives it a worthy frame.” Normal Heart” is the kind of show that hits you like a jackhammer. Twenty-five years since it premiered at the Public Theater, it remains a powerful example of political theater at its most direct, passionate and urgent levels. . . . The intimate show, which is co-directed by Grey and George C. Wolfe, is set on a bare stage whose white walls are covered with facts about the time period and the disease. At the very end, the names of AIDS victims flood the stage and spill into the auditorium itself. It is a devastating effect.” persuasive, compensating for the play’s occasional tendency to treat its characters as mouthpieces and to overload on factoids and statistics. He builds gripping drama out of the battle to get past the indifference of the political, medical and media establishment. . . . His play also touches on other contentious issues of gay marriage and healthcare that remain ongoing. This is tough, unflinching drama staged and performed by people with a fierce emotional investment in telling this story and keeping this painful history alive for generations inclined to forget. A long-stalled film adaptation is finally in development, with Ryan Murphy slated to direct Mark Ruffalo as Ned. In the meantime, this production makes a stunning case for the play’s power and relevance.” in America," which also dealt with AIDS and had its first major New York revival this season. Kramer is hardly subtle. He uses the play as a soapbox, attacking then-Mayor Ed Koch for apathy and The New York Times for not spreading the word about the plague. It is in those moments that the work transcends the New York of the 1980s. Was this also what it was like for peace activists watching in horror as the massacres in Darfur or Bosnia were starting? "The Normal Heart" is an indictment of too-cold bureaucracies and less-than-eager politicians. It is also a window into debates the gay community has undertaken as they push for marriage rights — how far to push, how much to refer to their own sexuality, how strident they must be.” performance and a stellar cast, this revival, co-directed by Joel Grey and George C. Wolfe, has two things going for it that Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s brave original at the Public Theater lacked. The first is memory: Over the course of the evening, the walls of David Rockwell’s blanched set become crowded with the projected names of the dead. When those walls no longer can contain them, the entire Golden Theatre becomes a sob-inducing memorial. The second thing is the comforting illusion that with the advent of protease inhibitors, the plague ended. It didn’t. . . . “The Normal Heart” is unabashed agitprop, which is rarely welcome on Broadway, and Ned Weeks is an unlikely hero. But as “Jerusalem” is also showing us, not all heroes wear white hats. Some are unpleasant company, doing what they must, demanding that attention be paid.” Kramer’s ferociously rhetorical work has lost little urgency; if anything, changes to the AIDS crisis let our focus extend to the play’s other concerns. This is essentially Ibsen for our times: “An Enemy of the People,” with Kramer’s loudmouthed surrogate, Ned Weeks—played with streaming intelligence and writhing neurosis by Joe Mantello. . . . The entire company acts up a storm, and the production leaves you drenched. “The Normal Heart” is hectoring, stiff and one-sided; it is also raw, scary and galvanizing. That’s Kramer in a nutshell, and his kind of nuts we still need.” in the same sentence: It’s a screed, not a play; its language is docu-informational, not dramatic; it’s got no swing, no poetry, just facts and spittle, and yet, its passion is important. I’d say it’s more than important: It’s life itself — life fighting desperately and often repellently for life. The Normal Heart endures not only because AIDS (many tens of millions of deaths later) still has no cure, but because the place of the inconvenient activist (the gadfly, the irritant, the minor terrorist) is still unresolved in a society where compromise is prized above all else, but often leaves us, well, compromised — sometimes fatally.” alive you are. You'll be moved, enraged, buzzed, and haunted. You will feel. By the end of the masterful revival of Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart--directed by Joel Grey and George C. Wolfe--the audience has been put through an emotional ringer and is almost too shattered to applaud. But they do. They cheer.” “There's so much urgency in Kramer's play that it doesn't exactly qualify as a historical artifact. It also brings up a lot of issues, like gay marriage and the right to inherit, that remain relevant outside their original context. Mostly, though, the play still works because it has the power to move and disturb us. As the play's original producer, Joe Papp, put it: "I love the ardor of this play, its howling, its terror and its kindness." bygone era. . . . Twitter-like brevity and restraint have never been Larry Kramer's strong suits, and in “The Normal Heart” he gives free rein to all of his impulses, whims, arguments, and counterarguments about the institutional forces he believes were too slow to react to a looming epidemic that felled many of his friends. (Always one to demand the last word, the playwright is distributing a one-page letter to audiences as they exit the theater, calling for more efforts to eradicate AIDS as an ongoing ''worldwide plague.'') This is not a great play, to be honest. There is too much speechifying by characters who are too easily interchangeable. But as a chronicle of a historical moment, “The Normal Heart” still packs a serious emotional wallop.” Heart." Finally where it belongs, on Broadway, it can be seen now for the towering American tragedy that it is, as essential to our culture as "Long Day's Journey Into Night" or "Death of a Salesman." Being given a letter-perfect production by directors Joel Grey and George C. Wolfe, this is a "Heart" that beats with blistering but redemptive power. . . . Kramer's indispensable work tells us who we were and how we got here. Such knowledge is indispensable for knowing where we should be headed and how to get there. If you see only one play this year, make it "The Normal Heart." much a polemic as a play. But, either way, it was extraordinarily powerful. Now that AIDS is off the front page and seems to be controlled, if not cured, in this country, I wondered how effective the play's revival, which opened Wednesday night at the John Golden Theatre, would be. My answer came with the first line, when a young man, waiting nervously to see a doctor, says to a friend, "I know something is wrong." The play's immediacy came rushing back. And it never flagged. . . . Joe Mantello gives a magnificent performance as Ned Weeks, the alter ego of playwright Larry Kramer, conceived by the author as a flawed hero.” death sentence, Larry 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. . . . 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. There are certain things you shouldn't say about yourself from a stage, even if they're true.” | |
