[In the assessment below, Kanfer characterizes Ned Weeks in The Destiny of Me as "an authentically tragic figure. "]

There are two Larry Kramers. One is the quiet, intense author of fiction, plays and film scenarios, including a memorable adaptation of the D. H. Lawrence novel Women in Love. The other Larry Kramer is the founder of the organization called ACT-UP. Its shock troops personify the noisome In-Your-Face style—bursting into St. Patrick's Cathedral in the middle of a mass, blocking out the scheduling signs at Grand Central Station, shouting down politicians and doctors, all in the name of AIDS activism. They have raised the consciousness of hundreds—and turned off thousands more.

The author admits that a good many of his followers are now "'problem kids' I often no longer recognize, often don't like, who give me a lot of lip and grief, but of whom I'm fiercely proud and protective and fight like an angry mother to defend when they're in trouble. Which is often." That attitude informs Kramer II's latest play, The Destiny of Me, at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Lip and grief are the main ingredients of this autobiographical work; defensiveness provides the subtext.

Author/activist/AIDS victim Ned Weeks (Jonathan Hadary) has just assumed another role: guinea pig. At a government-funded hospital outside Washington, D.C., Dr. Della Vida (Bruce McCarty) has devised a new treatment for men who are HIV positive. It may work; it may be just another false lead. In any event, the procedure will be lengthy and excruciating. Ned decides to roll the dice.

When we first see the narrator, he is wiring himself up to a machine that monitors blood and body chemistry. Settling into bed, he considers his past in a series of flash-backs. The more virulent his reaction to the medicine, the more vivid his memories become. In a fever Ned confronts his young self (John Cameron Mitchell), growing up in wartime Washington. After some unchallenging early years, the hyperkinetic kid senses that he has become "different." But he is unaware of what the difference is, or how to cope with it. Ned's older brother, Benjamin (Peter Frechette), is preoccupied with the pursuit of athletic and academic prizes. Their quarrelsome parents, Richard and Rina (Ralph Waite and Carole Shelley), are even less attentive. Richard, a Yale graduate who never realized his promise, has settled for a civil service job that gradually grinds him into dust. Rina spends her days in charity work, doing good for humanity, while she ignores her home, husband and sons.

With the onset of puberty Ned finds various methods of expression, ranging from theatrical outbursts ( "The Glass Menagerie is great, and they gave the Pulitzer to a play about an invisible rabbit!"), to schoolboy scriving, to dressing up in his mother's clothes. One night Richard happens upon his son in drag, leading to a pivotal scene of outrage, bewilderment and violence. After that, Ned's destiny is never in doubt. Reckless liaisons follow, with fellow students, teachers and colleagues. They always produce the same unhappy result. Hours of therapy provide little help. The one man who returns Ned's affection dies a year after the affair begins—bequeathing his companion the AIDS virus. Except for this single interlude, as the narrator openly conceded, he has been unlovable for a lifetime.

Was his militant personality and homosexuality formed in the family crucible? Did he lack a male role model? Did Mama's coquettish manner encourage imitation by her little boys? In that case, why isn't Benjamin gay? Or do surroundings have nothing to do with homosexuality? Is it predetermined, residing in the DNA, waiting to come out? The subject of nurture vs. nature has been debated for decades, and Kramer kicks it around for three acts without offering any resolution.

What he does offer is a series of witty, tormented exchanges between the protagonist and the objects of his scorn. Kramer, by the way, is not as egomaniacal as the title suggests. It comes, quite appropriately, from Walt Whitman's poem, Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking:

Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was
  before what there in the night,
By the sea under the yellow and sagging moon,
The messenger there aroused, the fire, the sweet
  hell within,
The unknown want, the destiny of me.

Destiny's cast gives even more than it gets. Rina, for example, might easily have emerged a Freudian caricature. Shelley makes her oddly sympathetic and wholly credible as she ages 40 years in the space of two hours. Oni Faida Lampley is poignantly effective as a black nurse whose backchat keeps her from falling apart. ("Everyone on every floor is dying; this is the new Lourdes.") And Frechette could scarcely be bettered as the man who first counsels Ned to go "straight," but ends up envying his brother's stubborn integrity.

Good as those performers are, though, they cannot rise to the level of Hadary and Mitchell as different aspects of the same spiky narrator. The youth has exactly the right mix of exuberance and insecurity, tripping over his own intelligence, putting himself down before anyone else gets a chance to do it. The older Ned attempts insult comedy, defiant monologues, explosive confrontations—anything to keep from looking in the mirror and confronting the one person he did not want to become: an authentically tragic figure.

Director Marshall W. Mason, who only a few weeks ago was at sea with The Seagull, is masterly here; the contemporary scene is obviously his metier. John Lee Beatty's stage design is imaginative and fluid, shuttling easily from the '40s to the '60s to the '90s and back again. Melina Root's costumes and Dennis Parichy's lighting add verisimilitude, and Peter Kater's incidental cello music suggests melancholia without its concomitant, self-pity.

I think it unlikely that the problem kids of ACT-UP will understand or even attend The Destiny of Me. A pity; Kramer's tocsin sounds from the front lines, and there is not a soul among them who can afford to ignore it. The playwright had hoped to lead his fellow sufferers out of their predicament by assaulting an indifferent government and a recalcitrant church. Now he can only warn the gay world that tantrums are no substitute for responsibility. A pandemic is loosed upon the earth, and the obituary page grows longer by the week. The epitaph Ned speaks for himself will echo long after the curtain rings down for the last time: "I wanted to be Moses, but I could only be Cassandra."