[In the following review, Brustein asserts that The Destiny of Me lacks an "existential tragic vision " and charges that in the play Kramer's "constant purpose is to induce, excavate, and heighten the audience's sense of guilt. "]

Art and journalism may not be natural bedfellows, but ever since Euripides social-minded dramatists have been inclined to write editorials instead of plays. Against his better nature, Ibsen composed a few such editorials himself (notably A Doll's House and Enemy of the People), which made Bernard Shaw, that sometime journalist, wrongly assume "discussion" to be the quintessence of Ibsenism. You can always tell that a playwright is in an editorial mood when his language turns declarative: "I am angry against the Gods" (Euripides); "He is strongest who stands alone" (Ibsen); "Maybe we'll fix it so life won't be printed on dollar bills" (Odets); "Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a man" (Miller). This kind of broadcast prose usually indicates that the writer, caught up in an urgent issue, has momentarily become indistinguishable from his protagonist in pursuit of radical change.

Editorial drama can be a lively and useful form of playwrighting, but it's not the most textured or profound. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously called the mark of a really fine mind the ability to keep at least two ideas in your head at the same time. Since conflict (whether of thought or action) is the very essence of drama, you might say that command of dialectic is also the mark of a really fine playwright. Editorial writers, on the other hand, usually stop at thesis without encountering antithesis, which is to say, they are content with only one idea.

I suspect that Larry Kramer would be perfectly happy with a column on the oped page of The New York Times. His earlier play, The Normal Heart, in fact, was mainly about the rage of his autobiographical hero, Ned Weeks, over that newspaper's inadequate coverage of the AIDS crisis compared with the articles it devoted to Legionnaires' disease. Kramer is an AIDS activist—more recently (and lamentably) an AIDS victim. His playwrighting has consisted almost exclusively of an effort to raise media awareness of this plague so as to shame the government into committing sufficient resources to a cure.

This is a noble cause, which Kramer has pursued with force, constancy, and eloquence. He's not alone. AIDS related plays now constitute a whole subsection of modern American drama: As Is, Eastern Standard, The Baltimore Waltz, Lips Together, Teeth Apart, Falsettos, and, preeminently, Angels in America are only a sampling. Sometimes, as in the case of Scott McPherson (Marvin's Room), the playwrights don't outlive the run of their plays. It is almost as if this dreadful scourge, which is killing so many of our dear theatrical friends, has assumed a presence in our drama similar to that of fate in Oedipus or venereal disease in Ghosts.

But AIDS is not only a lurking tragic inevitability, it represents an unsolved medical mystery in need of attention. And therein lies the critic's difficulty. How do you assess the artistic qualities of such an urgent social agenda? If the editorial function dominates Kramer's new play, The Destiny of Me (at the Lucille Lortel Theater), that is because the author sees AIDS exclusively as proof of an unjust society that must be shamed into action. Set, like so many modern plays, in a hospital room (is disease now the metaphor of our times?), the play begins with Ned Weeks engaging in clinical tests while the gay activists he leads picket outside. In his own mind at least, Ned has now assumed the role of homosexual messiah ("I can't save the world with my mouth shut"), enduring experimental treatment while awaiting his obit in the Times.

His enemy is "they"—the vast American majority that wants to "kill off all the faggots and niggers and spics. … Too many of us have been allowed to die. There's not one person out there that doesn't believe a genocide is going on." In this vaguely paranoid conspiracy fantasy, "they" even include the doctor and nurse who are trying to help him, whom he abuses for "rat shit" cures and for being unwitting pawns in a homophobic American plot. Told that President Bush is eager to find a cure, he retorts, "He's brain-dead and you're brain-washed," while offering to donate to the president some of his tainted blood.

Running parallel with this hospital drama is a memory play about Ned's Jewish family—his brutal, unfeeling father, his bustling, possessive mother, his sympathetic, straight brother, and himself as a waggish, sensitive young gay. This, too, is a story of injustice and insensitivity. Dad punches him out for being a sissy ("I never wanted you. I should have shot my load in the toilet"), Mom is too passive, even brother Ben sends Ned to a shrink to "cure" him of his sexual condition. At the end, facing death, Ned informs his younger self of his blighted HIV-infected future, and they join in singing "Only Make Believe."

It is the makeup of this family, and probably the excessive length of the evening (three hours), that has led critics to compare Larry Kramer to Eugene O'Neill. His true kinship, however, is with Arthur Miller (with family ties to Clifford Odets, Tennessee Williams, and David Rabe as well). O'Neill, like most great dramatists, knows that no one is free from responsibility, and A Long Day's Journey concludes with the author's understanding and forgiveness for all his benighted characters, including the author's surrogate. But there is very little self-examination in The Destiny of Me, aside from the uninvestigated idea (anticipated in The Normal Heart) that gays have trouble finding love because they're always seeking sex. Kramer's enemy is invariably the Other, and his constant purpose is to induce, excavate, and heighten the audience's sense of guilt.

What the play lacks, in short, is O'Neill's existential tragic rhythm, a quality that Dennis Potter also managed to capture in yet another work about disease, The Singing Detective. Still, for all its self-absorption, self-exoneration, and self-importance, The Destiny of Me is never boring. Ned Weeks displays much the same vital energy as Osborne's Jimmy Porter, another relentless kvetch whose endless grievances kept the blood pulsing through his veins—though, in the case of Ned Weeks, his blood may be killing him.

Marshall Mason's Circle Repertory Company production, however, has too much vital energy. Instead of cutting The Destiny of Me, he has raced it, creating the technical clatter of a farce marathon. I found the tone and pace incongruous with a reflective memory play. Jonathan Hadary, as the older Ned Weeks, rattles his lines in a manner appropriate to the Broadway musicals that poster his hospital walls, and John Cameron Mitchell as his youthful self, though ingratiating, is often stuck in showtime. The ripening, red-haired, dark-voiced Piper Laurie is seriously miscast as a Jewish mother. David Spielberg as the father has convincing early moments, but his violent rages are embarrassingly staged. Peter Frechette as brother Ben ages well and manages the difficult feat of creating irregular details inside a square character. Oni Faida Lampley as Nurse Hanniman possesses authority and humor. But I didn't believe for a moment that Bruce McCarty's callow Doctor Della Vida had ever had more than a few weeks of medical training. As for John Lee Beatty's setting, it is serviceable as an antiseptic hospital room but is transformed clumsily and unconvincingly in the domestic scenes. The same might be said for this editorialized play.