Two blog posts in one night? Cheese and Crackers Batman, he's gone from lazy to overachiever!!
Be ready to feel cheated, my, what, 5 readers? Unfortunately, you're not going to get a synopsis like you did for the last play. For one thing, it's getting to be late at night. For two things.....I really don't know if I can bring myself to go through that whole story again just yet.
All I have to say about 'The Normal Heart' is that it is everything theatre should be. It relied on convention, lights, costumes, and scene shifts, sure. But it captured what all good theatre is meant to do. At least in my opinion.
Through Playbill.com, 'The Normal Heart' had a special outreach night for young adults. If you showed an ID that proved you were born after 1980, you got a discount. And they had a special talkback after the show about AIDS awareness and the next generation. But what moved me in the talkback had less to do with the subject matter and more to do with what Lee Pace, the actor playing Bruce Niles, had to say about what the show was meant to do. The magic of the theatre is that it brings craftsmen and audience together into a space, and for one night they all agree to take a journey together. And what happens is for the people in that room. Try as we might, we cannot explain to someone who wasn't there what it was like to feel everyone's collected breath being held, or how it felt to feel every heart reach up onto the stage and hurt for the characters. No, it was for us. Just us. And 'The Normal Heart' accomplished that in a profound way. The production gave the audience a human story, and the audience gave the production a human response.
I think now I'm digressing a bit and just spewing what must smell like hog wash coming down from atop my artistic pedestal. And maybe you're right. Because I haven't found the words yet to describe that experience. But you can never make me believe that when 500 or so people come together and share in a performance of that caliber, something mystical and spiritual doesn't happen.
'The Normal Heart' is about the lives of a few men in New York City at the start of the AIDS epidemic, and their struggle to help the gay community respond to the disaster. They are in the midst of the crest of the sexual revolution: Gay men are finally becoming comfortable with who they are and expressing themselves and their love in a free way. But then the disease strikes. They're not sure where it came from, and less sure about how it is spreading. But the doctor who diagnosed patient zero and the man trying desperately to reach out to the community believe it is being spread through sex. Their great challenge is convincing their friends to take a stand and preach abstinence, and getting the government to recognize this epidemic and in some way help a community in disaster. But, as history shows, help and knowledge come too little, too late to save the hundreds who died in the first years.
Already some of you are rolling your eyes, or using your religious beliefs to put some sort of barrier between yourself and what this play has to say. But I challenge you to come see this play and remain unchanged. So often, especially in the South, issues like this have no face, no humanity: they become purely politics. This piece does what theatre should: it brings humanity back into the story. It puts faces on the struggles, and calls us to empathy.
I've been prejudiced in my life. I won't deny that. Anyone who knew me when I was younger would tell you that I was quick to want to condemn people. I'm still that way now, though hopefully less so. But there was a woman who came to the talkback who is the head of and AIDS outreach program that tries to educate young people. In the late 70s, her father received a blood transfusion containing what was then the unknown AIDS virus, and her father and mother both died of the disease, disgraced and looked down on as druggies or perverts. This is not, nor has it ever been, a gay man's disease. This plays tells the tragic story of how it became an epidemic that to this day has infected 75 million people worldwide. I would hope that regardless of who you are and what you believe, you can set aside some of your own judgements to look on this tragedy, acknowledge it for what it is, and vow to do what you can to never let something like this happen again.
Or not. Maybe you leave the theater disgusted, unable to believe someone would dignify such a story with a broadway stage. Maybe the sight of two men kissing is an abomination. Maybe the deaths of 35 million people are just desserts. Or maybe, just maybe, you can simply feel the power of the story. Simple be in the moment, there with the storytellers, listening with rapt ears like children in a library. Maybe you can leave the building not sure how to describe what you experience, just knowing that you felt something, and that sometimes feeling something is enough. It is, after all, what makes us human. And as the great Oscar Wilde said, "I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being."
But who am I to tell you what to do. All I will say is this: GO SEE THIS PLAY. It's a work of art.
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