[In the following essay, Shatzky contrasts the polemical approach to the AIDS crisis in The Normal Heart to the highly personal focus of As Is, an AIDS play by William Hoffman.]

When William Hoffman's As Is opened in early March 1985 at the Circle Repertory Theatre, followed a month later by Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart at the Public Theatre, they were not the first plays on the subject of AIDS produced in this country. Jeff Hagedorn's monologue One was performed earlier, and in 1984 Seven Stages Theater of Atlanta produced Warren which was performed in Hawaii and San Francisco. The Aids Show, which originated in San Francisco, also preceded the New York debuts of As Is and The Normal Heart. But, as with most other shows that do not become "visible" to the national media until they are given a New York production, it was the latter two that established the basic approaches to the dramatization of the AIDS epidemic: personal reaction and public outrage.

By the time As Is opened, the AIDS epidemic had finally become widely recognized because it had already claimed 5,000 lives. This number was mentioned in several reviews of the plays as if to legitimize the anger expressed in both plays. Jack Kroll in Newsweek [13 May 1985] seemed, in fact, to be apologetic in explaining that "these plays, however, are not 'homosexual' plays; they enact situations and raise questions of universal concern for everyone, straight or gay, male or female." William Henry, in Time [13 May 1985], commented that "these AIDS plays reach out to heterosexuals, both for help in combatting the disease and to warn that it is spreading into the 'straight' population."

Of course, both As Is and The Normal Heart are very specifically about gay relationships, the problems that straights have in understanding and accepting gay sexuality, as well as the problems gays face in trying to deal with the disease that is destroying them. For although there are stylistic differences between the two plays, they are quite similar in their expression of the feelings between the lovers whose tragedy provides the emotional thrust of both dramas.

The relationship between Rich and Saul in As Is is at the center of the play. The play begins with their "divorce" when they decide on who is to take which pieces of furniture from the apartment they have shared. The bantering tone, however, is punctured when Rich reveals, after the two catalogue the deaths of their friends who have been victims of AIDS, "I have it." The rest of me play records the progression of the disease, Rich's anger and denial, his wish to kill himself, and his coming to terms with his illness. At the end, the two men, now emotionally lovers again, wish to consummate their relationship with "something safe." The play ends with the two together in Rich's hospital bed, the curtain drawn by a sympathetic hospice worker.

Although the love between two men in The Normal Heart is not nearly the central focus of the play as in As Is, there are a number of parallels in the development of the relationships of the lovers in each play. Ned Weeks, the protagonist of The Normal Heart, is not the jilted lover who must be reconciled; instead he begins a relationship with Felix, a man very reticent about his gayness and fearful he might lose his job. Felix, in fact, had been formally married, and Ned chides him for not fighting to see his son: "That means you're ashamed. So he will be too." But in many ways the plots of the two plays are similar. Just as Rich reveals his illness to Saul, Felix confides in Ned his suspicion that he is coming down with the disease. Just as there is a scene of rage and denial between Rich and Saul, there is one between Felix and Ned, who laments, "Whoever thought you'd die from having sex?" And just as Rich and Saul consummate their love for each other at the end of As Is, Felix and Ned go through an informal marriage ceremony just before Felix dies.

In both plays there is an estrangement and a reconciliation between one of the men and his brother. In As Is, the brother has found it extremely difficult to cope with Rich's gayness, but he embraces him in his hospital bed. The Normal Heart ends with an embrace between Ned and his brother, Ben. The act of reconciliation is significant in both plays because it indicates the protagonists' need to "connect" with their families while asserting their own conviction in who and what they are. Despite Kroll's and Henry's observations, these family connections are the only gestures the authors make toward the straight world. The consummation scenes, however, are a more clear indication of the assertive stance presented by Hoffman and Kramer; this stance is more difficult to maintain than twenty years ago because although the triumphs of the sixties and seventies established gays with the right to their own life-style, the public's attitude toward AIDS has put many gays on the defensive.

These structural parallels aside, however, the plays are very different in their approach to the problems of AIDS. This difference is reflected in the critics' reactions to these two dramas. In contrasting them, one critic [Paul Berman, in the Nation, 11 May 1985] notes, "There's no trumpet call to action in As Is, instead merely—merely!—an effort to accept impending death." Another [Gerald Weales, in the Commonweal, 12 July 1985] remarks on the play's "softness" and criticizes it for its upbeat ending "sentimentality"; whereas a third [Frank Rich, in the New York Times, 11 March 1985] praises As Is for being more than "a documentary account of an AIDS victim's grotesque medical history … [the play] reaches out to examine the impact of AIDS on hetero- and homosexual consciences as well as to ask the larger questions (starting with 'Why me?') that impale any victims of terminal illness."

The critical reaction to The Normal Heart is far more contentious, not only because of the play's polemical content and harsh tone, but also because of the playwright's willingness to "name names" of those he feels should be confronted with their callousness and cowardice because they did not act even when the magnitude of the disease became obvious. Although one critic [Berman] agrees that Kramer's indictment of the Koch administration is valid because the city failed to respond more quickly and seriously to the epidemic, he also dismisses the play as "a pain in the neck," "a long rant from a pamphlet on AIDS," and having "an amateurish script." Another [John Simon, in New York Magazine, 6 May 1985] observes that "Kramer's play … is less literate and poetic than As Is, but more rousingly polemical, more politically and morally challenging." New York Times critic Frank Rich reacted to Kramer's accusations in the play by defending his paper: "Some of the author's specific accusations are questionable, and, needless to say, we often hear only one side of inflammatory debates" [22 April 1985]. He adds, "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." On the same page as the review, the Times even included a denial of Kramer's accusation that the Times had failed to cover AIDS and the defense that the newspaper had sent a member of the science staff to cover the story as soon as it had been informed of the existence of the disease. In an article several weeks after this review, Mel Gussow in the Times [28 April 1985], although observing that The Normal Heart "mixes fact, fiction and dramatization in the manner of a Costa-Gavras movie," also concedes that "Mr. Kramer's play has a historical perspective both in its treatment of homosexuality and its attitude toward public apathy."

Other critics praised Kramer for his polemics, for example, "Like the best social playwrights, Kramer produces not a series of debates but a cross-fire of life-and-death energies that illuminate the many issues and create a fierce and moving human drama" (Kroll). Another critic [Henry] felt that Kramer "dishes up highly imaginative invective, not least toward a character based upon himself." Both plays were given praise for the courageousness with which they approached the subject, but because of the political nature of Kramer's work, it created a greater variance of opinion among the critics.

These reactions from the New York critics indicate that unlike many plays that are judged on the basis of aesthetic qualities in terms of script, production, and performance, As Is and The Normal Heart had created an audience that attended as much to the political and social content of these works as to their dramatic vitality. As Mel Gussow observed, "Though English dramatists from John Osbourne to David Hare to Caryl Churchill have been concerned—and in some cases, obsessed—with questions of public portent, American dramatists have generally tended to neglect this area while contemplating questions of a more psychological and behavioral nature. When they have explored politics, it is often through a smoke-screen of symbolism." Arthur Miller's The Crucible could be cited as such an example; the play uses the Salem Witch Trials to create a parallel to McCarthyism. But in the case of the two AIDS plays, as Gerald Weales concedes, "Neither work seems to me a particularly distinguished play, but the enthusiastic and obviously moved audiences are not simply expressing their approval of the plays and the performances, which are fine in both cases. They are responding to subject matter." It is precisely because neither playwright tried to treat the AIDS epidemic in symbolic terms or to compromise his portrayal of gay men that these dramas have had such an electrifying effect on their audiences. This forthrightness is characteristic of gay literature of the last decade and is an active expression of the gay community's political as well as social agenda: to go beyond a request to be "accepted" by straight society to an affirmation of their own cultural and sexually identity. The Normal Heart and As Is share this assertiveness.

When one compares the two plays, however, it is clear that the authors have contrasting responses to AIDS. Hoffman's play, although tinged with anger, is very much a nostalgic—and, at times, satiric—look at the "good old days." The character Saul recalls, "I was at the gym soaking in the hot tub when I first heard about AIDS. It was how many years ago?" As the disease progresses, Rich becomes more nostalgic, remembering his youth: "I was a good kid, but I was lonely and scared all the time. I was so desperate to find people like myself that I looked for them in the indexes of books—under H. I eventually found them. … And then I found you in a porno theatre."

In addition to Rich's wistful remembrance of his past, Hoffman also presents a satirical view of the gay scene in the late seventies before the AIDS epidemic rendered that world desolate:

Clone 2: Thought you were this guy Chip I met here on Jockstrap Night.

Clone 1: Haven't been here since the Slave Auction.

The main point of Hoffman's play is to reach the audience through depicting the humanity and suffering of the two central characters as well as other, more anonymous figures who share in this suffering. One critic [Weales] found in Rich the "Camille image" of someone's "gentle … wasting away." But there is also anger in Rich: "I can't afford to be noble. The only thing holding me together is rage. It's not fair! Why me?"

Not confident that he will make his point by focusing solely on his central characters, Hoffman intersperses the scenes depicting Rich and Saul's relationship with monologues of a hospice worker, two men responding to panic calls on an AIDS hotline, and several anonymous men and women who reveal "the first time I heard about it." None of the characters other than Rich and Saul are really developed, so despite the nonpolemical focus on them, Hoffman feels obligated to try to expand and extend his emotional territory to include a cross-section of those members of American society who have been affected in one way or another by the disease. It is as if he has an impulse to be polemical, but his method dictates that he reveal his main theme through a love story.

The Normal Heart takes much the opposite approach. It is a roughly autobiographical account of the circumstances surrounding the beginnings of the AIDS epidemic in New York and Kramer's activity in the Gay Men's Health Crisis, which helped counsel and comfort those who were stricken with the disease from its outset. In the three years chronicled in the play, 1981-84, Kramer takes on such members of the Establishment as the New York Times, Mayor Koch, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, and the entire medical profession. Kramer is criticized [by Weales] for "almost smotherfing] his play by dropping great chunks of now unnecessary information on its opening section," and because the "rhetoric of accusation begins to get silly when the foot-draggers, from Mayor Koch to the members of the NIH committees, are presumed to be acting out of their fear of being found out as closet gays." Yet the play always proves to be lively, fast paced, witty, and dramatically effective when the playwright is dealing with issues and ideas as in the following encounter between Ned, several other members of his organization, and the Mayor's assistant.

NED: We have been trying to see the mayor for fourteen months. It has taken us one year just to get this meeting with you and you are an hour and forty-five minutes late. Have you told the mayor there's an epidemic here?

Hiram: I can't tell him that!

Ned: Why not?

Hiram: Because it isn't true.

Bruce: Yes sir, it is.

Hiram: Who said so?

Tommy: The government.

Hiram: Which government? Our government?

Ned: NO! Russia's government!

Hiram: Since when?

Mickey: The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta declared it.

Tommy: Seventeen months ago.

Ned: HOW could you not know that?

Hiram: Well, you can't expect us to concern ourselves with every little outbreak these boys come up with. And could you please reduce the level of your hysteria?

This rapid-fire banter both is dramatically effective and contains some of the information the playwright wants the audience to know about the callousness of the mayor of a city that has a grossly disproportionate number of AIDS cases, in part, undoubtedly, owing to the mayor's inaction when the epidemic began. Even a critic who found much to object to in the tone and presentation of the play [Berman] admitted, in referring to Mayor Koch, "And lest you're tempted to let him off the hook, the walls of the theater are covered with damning statistics about AIDS and government response, and drawing and quartering [of them] is the least that should happen."

Throughout the play there is conflict, with Ned Weeks as the focal point. The conflict with the "outside" world of city officials and unresponsive doctors, who even reject the application for a grant from the courageous woman physician who pioneered research into AIDS, is mirrored by Ned's conflict within his organization. Near the end of the play, he is told by the organization's president that he is being relieved of his position. Bruce regards Ned as "a bully" because Ned is so insistent in having his way in dramatizing the horrors of the disease and the urgency with which it must be met. Ned, however, feels that the organization is being "strangled" by the timidity of the leadership and its reluctance to fight against the indifference of the general public and, particularly, the mayor of New York.

The momentum created by conflict, argument, even rhetoric, gives the play an immense vitality, yet Kramer feels obliged to include the personal relationship between Ned and Felix. But the repartee between the two seems forced when Ned is not discussing his "cause."

Felix: I have something to tell you.

Ned: You're pregnant.

Felix: I was married once.

Ned: Does that make me the other woman?

There are, in fact, only four scenes between Ned and Felix out of sixteen after they become lovers; the most dramatic is the one in which Ned tries to help Felix deal with his illness. But, structurally, the relationship between them is dealt with episodically, while the play's main thrust is the developing urgency of the AIDS crisis and Ned's increasing frustration in trying to get his colleagues and adversaries to deal with the epidemic as he thinks they should.

The contrasting approaches to the AIDS epidemic in these two dramas are reflected in later works, but the approaches are also prototypical of the dramatic treatment of other social and political issues. The most tempting analogy to AIDS, and one that I make with some reluctance because it has been so inappropriately overused, is the Holocaust. Certainly, there appears to be no evil antagonist who is deliberately killing the innocent victims of AIDS; nor is there the sense that the deaths of the victims are due to the arbitrary fact that they share a religious background.

Yet there are two significant characteristics of AIDS victims that make them similar to victims of the Holocaust: they are treated with apparent indifference by those who would seem to be able to mitigate the situation; and they are a "minority" group in some way, easily misunderstood, regarded as "different from the rest of us."

In the play, Ned makes the analogy to the Holocaust when he complains to Felix of the lack of coverage the papers have given the epidemic and points out that the New York Times and the Washington Post had buried the story of the Final Solution even though both newspapers were owned by Jews. His feelings of rage at the cowardice and timidity of the leaders of the gay community bring him to see the connection between the victims of AIDS and the victims of the world's indifference to Hitler's barbarism.

Dramatic treatments of the Holocaust do reflect the two basic modes of presentation exemplified by As Is and The Normal Heart. The personal approach can be seen in such plays as the dramatization of The Diary of Anne Frank (1955) or I Never Saw Another Butterfly (1979) about the children of Theresienstadt. The more public, polemical approach can be seen in a confrontational play such as Hochuth's The Deputy (1963), which accuses Pope Pius XII of acquiesence in the murder of the European Jews. There are, of course, a vast array of dramas about the Holocaust that do not neatly fall into either category, but as Kramer suggests, aspects of the suffering of the victims and the indifference of the outer world that one finds in dramas about AIDS have echoes in Holocaust literature. One might find similar prototypes in African-American drama—the confrontational works of Ed Bullins and Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) in contrast to the more personal approaches of Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson. But repetition of this prototype only reflects that people who are oppressed will respond to their oppression in some basic ways: the impulse to humanize themselves so that others can understand them and the contrasting desire to indict those whom they feel are the cause of their suffering. What makes the analogy between AIDS and the Holocaust particularly apt, as Kramer sees it, however, is that danger not only comes from the common enemy; it also can be found within the victimized group in their fear and temporizing.

In their different approaches, As Is and The Normal Heart reflect the confusion, frustration, and anger the gay community faces in dealing with the AIDS epidemic. A recent anthology of plays about AIDS, The Way We Live Now, shows that these two approaches have been adopted in a variety of ways.

In Safe Sex (1987), Harvey Fierstein bitterly satirizes the sexual lives of two gay men in the post-AIDS era. As the play opens, the lovers, Ghee and Mead, seem to be making love in the dark, but when the lights come up, it is revealed that they are lying flat on a balancing board, only their feet touching, a parodistic comment on Kramer's crusade for "safe sex." Ghee waxes nostalgic about "different times" and the play ends in an embrace. But the approach, although satirical, is meant to humanize the dilemma of the gay male faced with making a choice between physical love and physical safety.

In contrast, in a scene from Angels in America (1989), Tony Kushner recreates an encounter between Roy Cohn, the notorious lawyer of the McCarthy era and his doctor. In indicting Cohn's hypocrisy in persecuting homosexuals while being a practicing homosexual who succumbed to AIDS, Angels in America is similar to The Normal Heart because it targets an important historical figure who should have helped bring attention to the disease instead of denying his connection with it. Cohn's rationale for his sexual behavior demonstrates his elaborate self-deception: "I bring the guy I'm screwing to the White House and President Reagan smiles at us and shakes his hand. Because what I am is defined entirely by who I am. Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man … who fucks around with guys."

A number of plays in the anthology include a mixture of private reaction and public outrage. Terence McNally's Andre's Mother (1988) is a poetic elegy to a departed victim; Susan Sontag's The Way We Live Now (1989) combines elements of elegy with criticism of the casual attitude of doctors toward the disease. Although none of these works has the polemical energy and urgency of The Normal Heart, the changing attitudes towards AIDS have made such a play less appropriate than it was several years ago. Yet even today, indifference and ignorance about the disease still manifest themselves, particularly since it has now become less of an exclusively gay illness and more a disease of less articulate and well-connected victims—drug addicts and their spouses and lovers.

The theatrical response to AIDS by the gay community has been powerful and effective in bringing to the attention of the general public the dangers and tragedies that this disease has created. The two basic approaches to it have been evident from the outset: personal reaction and public rage as exemplified by As Is and The Normal Heart. But these responses are typical of articulate people who have been set apart from the rest of society because of society's ignorance and fear. The story of those who have no William Hoffmans or Larry Kramers or Susan Sontags among them is yet to be told, for they, too, have their tragedies but have not yet found the voices to cry out for them.