[In the laudatory review below, Simon praises the dual focus on Ned and Alexander in The Destiny of Me. "As Ned and Alexander interact, flow into each other across the years, and separate again, " Simon states, "we get, in ingenious double exposure, a coming-of-age and a coming-of-AIDS play. "]

In The Destiny of Me, Larry Kramer written a worthy sequel to The Normal Heart, his autobiography as Ned Weeks, writer and gay activist. In this long but absorbing play, Kramer superimposes Ned's battle with AIDS at the National Institute, under a scarcely disguised doctor figure, on his own growing up as Alexander, a precious adolescent in a middle-class, Depression-and-Holocaust-era Jewish family. The heterosexual older brother, Ben, and the somewhat flighty mother, Rena, are tolerant enough of Alexander's incipient homosexuality; but the father, Richard—a Yale graduate, minor bureaucrat, and professional failure—brutalizes the boy for his addiction to musical comedy, dressing up in his mother's clothes, and "sissy" personality. As Ned and Alexander interact, flow into each other across the years, and separate again, we get, in ingenious double exposure, a coming-of-age and a coming-of-AIDS play, a kind of—and this is meant as praise—Jewish-homosexual Long Day's Journey Into Night.

What Kramer captures expertly in the past is family relations in their ambiguities, hostilities, and reconciliations, with the brothers' love for each other finally overcoming all differences. And almost equally skillfully in the present, the bristling relations of patient and doctor, patient and nurse (who happens to be the doctor's wife), against a background of embattled gay activists whom Ned himself organized, but toward whom, with his strength now sapped by illness, his attitude has become ambivalent. But not hostile—as it is toward the doctor and sassy nurse, with both of whom he engages in a medical-political battle of wits, even as they, to the best of their belated abilities, try their utmost to save him. Yet this is deemed inadequate by both Ned and the loud and destructive—perhaps self-destructive—protesters, heard but not seen.

Under Marshall W. Mason's superlative direction, Kramer's characters always engage our attention, and often our feelings; what is lacking is language, the flare of poetry. It's like an Arthur Miller play trying to hoist itself into a Tennessee Williams one: We hear the straining bootstraps snap. The role of Ned fits Jonathan Hadary like a rubber glove; but while he is persuasive, John Cameron Mitchell, as Alexander, is something even better: compelling. Fine, too, is Oni Faida Lampley as the nurse; the others—Peter Frechette, Piper Laurie, Bruce McCarty, and David Spielberg—are okay, where more would be better. Except for one improbable conversion, the play makes no false move, and impresses by its ultimate fairness to all parties. Though it falls short of the higher reaches of art, it may be the most comprehending, and is certainly the most comprehensive, AIDS play so far.