[The Normal Heart debuted 21 April 1985 in a production by Joe Papp at the Public Theater in New York. In the following assessment of that production, Rich observes that, despite the play's theatrical shortcomings, there are "occasions when the stage seethes with the conflict of impassioned, literally life-and-death argument. "]

The blood that's coursing through The Normal Heart, the new play by Larry Kramer at the Public Theater, is boiling hot. In this fiercely polemical drama about the private and public fallout of the AIDS epidemic, the playwright starts off angry, soon gets furious and then skyrockets into sheer rage. Although Mr. Kramer's theatrical talents are not always as highly developed as his conscience, there can be little doubt that The Normal Heart is the most outspoken play around—or that it speaks up about a subject that justifies its author's unflagging, at times even hysterical, sense of urgency.

What gets Mr. Kramer mad is his conviction that neither the hetero- nor homosexual community has fully met the ever-expanding crisis posed by acquired immune deficiency syndrome. He accuses the Governmental, medical and press establishments of foot-dragging in combating the disease—especially in the early days of its outbreak, when much of the play is set—and he is even tougher on homosexual leaders who, in his view, were either too cowardly or too mesmerized by the ideology of sexual liberation to get the story out. "There's not a good word to be said about anyone's behavior in this whole mess," claims one character—and certainly Mr. Kramer has few good words to say about Mayor Koch, various prominent medical organizations, The New York Times or, for that matter, most of the leadership of an unnamed organization apparently patterned after the Gay Men's Health Crisis.

Some of the author's specific accusations are questionable, and, needless to say, we often hear only one side of inflammatory debates. But there are also occasions when the stage seethes with the conflict of impassioned, literally life-and-death argument. When the play's hero, a writer and activist named Ned Weeks (Brad Davis), implores his peers to curtail sexual activity rather than risk contracting AIDS, another equally righteous activist vehemently counters that such sweeping measures will negate years of brave, painfully hard-fought battles for the freedom to practice homosexual love "openly" and "without guilt." While the logic may be with Ned—"AIDS is not a civil rights issue but a contagion issue," he says—Mr. Kramer allows the antagonist, woundingly played by Robert Dorfman, to give full ideological and emotional vent to an opposing point-of-view.

Such issues constantly arise in The Normal Heart, giving it a profile quite distinct from that of As Is, William Hoffman's more intimately focused play about the AIDS plague. Mr. Kramer was a founder of the Gay Men's Health Crisis who parted with his colleagues after fraternal disputes about political tactics. The history of the protagonist in The Normal Heart is similar. Ned is a loud, tireless firebrand who favors confrontational strategies in dramatizing the AIDS threat; the mostly timid men who join him in founding an AIDS-awareness organization are often afraid either to risk public exposure of their sexuality or to take on the heterosexual power structure forthrightly. To thicken the conflict further, Mr. Kramer has Ned fall in love with such a weakling—a fictional New York Times reporter named Felix (D. W. Moffett) who can't decide how completely to step out of the closet.

The constant squabbles between the radical Ned and his cautiously liberal friends—which often sound like replays of those that divided the antiwar movement of the 60's—can become tiresome. The trouble is not that the arguments are uninteresting, but that Mr. Kramer is not always diligent about portraying Ned's opponents, including the organization's frightened president (David Allen Brooks), in credible detail. Worse, there's a galloping egocentricity that overruns and upstages the play's most pressing issues. The more the author delves into the minutiae of the organization's internecine politics, the more The Normal Heart moves away from the larger imperatives of the AIDS crisis and becomes a parochial legal brief designed to defend its protagonist against his political critics.

The writing's pamphleteering tone is accentuated by Mr. Kramer's insistence on repetition—nearly every scene seems to end twice—and on regurgitating facts and figures in lengthy tirades. Some of the supporting players, notably Ned's heterosexual brother (Phillip Richard Allen) and a heroic doctor (Concetta Tornei), are too flatly written to emerge as more than thematic or narrative pawns. The characters often speak in the same bland journalistic voice—so much so that lines could be reassigned from one to another without the audience detecting the difference.

If these drawbacks, as well as the somewhat formulaic presentation of the Ned-Felix love affair, blunt the play's effectiveness, diere are still many powerful vignettes sprinkled throughout. Much to his credit, Mr. Kramer makes no attempt to sanitize AIDS; the scenes featuring the disease's suffering victims are harrowing. The playwright is equally forceful—and at his most eloquent—when he passionately champions a prideful homosexual identity "that isn't just sexual."

The production does not always pump up the writing's flaccid passages. The director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, tends to freeze Ned and his opponents in place to declaim, as if they were members of a college debating society. The performances can also go slack. Mr. Davis has the unenviable assignment of playing a shrill public scold—who, like the author, can be his own worst enemy—and one admires the actor's refusal to sentimentalize him. But Mr. Davis does seem vacant in his reposeful romantic scenes with Mr. Moffett, whose characterization of the honestly conflicted Felix is the most complex and moving of the evening. In the lesser roles, only Mr. Dorfman and William DeAcutis, as another organization member, make sharp impressions.

The set, designed by Eugene Lee and Keith Raywood, encloses the audience in a whitewashed box, on which are emblazoned the names and state-by-state death tolls of AIDS victims. While one wishes that the play's outrage had been channeled into drama as fully compelling as its cause, the writing on the theater's walls alone could drive anyone with a normal heart to abandon what Mr. Kramer calls the "million excuses for not getting involved."