[In the following, which includes comments from Kramer himself, Muir emphasizes the autobiographical elements of The Destiny of Me.]

The best playwrights like to expose their souls on stage, but in his latest play Larry Kramer, who is also America's foremost AIDS activist, might as well have handed the audience a teaspoon and said: "Scoop out the contents of my head."

When Mr Kramer's London psychiatrist, on whose couch he spent seven years, heard about the play, he observed: "Sounds like Larry learnt something."

Mr Kramer's latest offering, The Destiny of Me, opened to strong reviews and packed houses in New York last month. What the critics descibed as "a Jewish homosexual Long Day's Journey into Night" is now set to run well into next year when it will also be staged in London.

The play is a Freudian's delight, being largely the auto-biographical tale of Mr Kramer's eventual acceptance of his homosexuality, and featuring parents-from-hell. It not only includes a split personality, but allows the two sides of the split to get on stage together. At the play's core is Ned Weeks, a homosexual in his fifties who is HIV positive, looking for a miracle cure, and not expecting to find it.

Mr Kramer is also HIV positive and is 57 years old. He is aware the miracle will not be forthcoming soon, but he has done more than almost anyone to make sure that the medical establishment looks for it. Hard. He set up Gay Men's Health Crisis and the powerful civil disobedience and lobby group ACT-UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) which counts among its "successes" the occasion on which 4,500 activists stormed St Patrick's cathedral in New York, chained themselves to the pews and held a "die in" at the feet of the cardinal.

His play is as angry—and funny—as some of the demonstrations he has engineered. But it has a nakedness, a willingness to gut family and self, that his previous play. The Normal Heart, did not risk so much. Why? Because Mr Kramer thought he would be dead by the time The Destiny of Me was staged. "I figured it would be the last words of an opinionated author," says Mr Kramer, in his apartment in Greenwich Village. "I wasn't in any hurry to get the play on originally, but then when I had a health scare with my liver and this HIV business in one ugly package, I decided. OK, I want to pull this out while I have my energy and my health."

He intended to leave word that the play should not be presented while his 93-year-old mother was alive. Now, given time by a medication that returned him to fairly good health, Mr Kramer is dreading the day she decides to leave her nursing home and come to the city for a viewing. His brother, Arthur, says the account of the family's life is "regrettably" rather accurate. Mr Kramer has changed the ending so that Ned Weeks fears death, rather than facing it head on.

What did Mr Kramer do when he discovered he was HIV positive? At first he campaigned obsessively and loudly against the government's lackadaisical attitude towards AIDS and what he considered to be the medical establishment's sloth. He wrote The Normal Heart, a scream for attention for AIDS, which became one of the biggest earners for the Royal Court Theatre, in London. Now, a kinder, gentler Kramer has forsaken the outside world of noise and anger for the world inside himself.

In the play, and in life, he dissects his early battle against his homosexuality in the 1950s, when some psychiatrists (and Mr Kramer saw a great many) still believed homosexuality could be "cured", and the closet was packed to bursting. Much of this is seen through the vehicle of his younger self who appears alongside the older version on stage.

This character came into being when Mr Kramer started talking to himself over a decade ago. He does not consider this madness; psychoanalysis has made him comfortable with this form of discourse. He saw value in it. "I found myself talking to a young boy and then I realised the boy was me, but a completely different individual with his own thoughts and character. We would often disagree. Then, I began writing down scenes between the two of us, began liking my younger self, and I wrote the kid's journey in the play, the journey towards his death."

The journey passes from "discovery to guilt to momentary joy and towards AIDS". As awful and agonising as it is, it has brought with it depth and wisdom. In a recent article in The New York Times he wrote: "My homosexuality, as unsatisfying as much of it was for so long, has been the single most defining characteristic in my life."

Mr Kramer pauses to take a call from Barbra Streisand's assistant who wants 12 copies of The Normal Heart script because Ms Streisand plans to put it on screen. A British Arena crew is making a film about Mr Kramer's life to be shown early next year. (His psychiatrist from London—where Mr Kramer spent much of the 1960s—refused to be interviewed for the documentary on ethical grounds, much, it seems, to the writer's disappointment.) A little bit of fame here and there delights him.

The angry, obnoxious, loud-mouthed. Mr Kramer, the caricature of someone else's play entitled The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, the scourge of talk shows, the needier of the Bush administration, seems to have gone quiet.

After an argument, Mr Kramer has mostly left ACT-UP to the younger generation, feeling that there is little more he—or they—can do. "One thing that comes with knowing your days are numbered is that you say. 'OK, I'm gonna edit my life now', and you don't waste time with idiots." He has decided to concentrate on finishing his latest novel and has rented a house near the beach in East Hampton to escape to. Royalties from his books and plays and even his script for the Ken Russell film, Women in Love, mean he is self-sufficient.

Tonight he is on fine form, but there are days when he gets depressed. Who would not? In the past ten years, he has attended too many funerals. Some of his friends who are HIV positive find their struggle a lot harder. Mr Kramer is not sure whether therapy, a comfortable life or just plain gutsiness make it easier for him.

"I don't feel negative. I pat myself on the shoulder that we all got through 12 years of Reagan-Bush without slitting our wrists. That says something about the indomitability of the human soul, that you can have faith and optimism even in the face of all the evidence to the contrary."