[In the following evaluation, Simon argues that The Normal Heart transcends its polemical tone to become "a fleshed-out, generously dramatized struggle, in which warring ideologies do not fail to breathe, sweat, weep, bleed—be human."]

We've all heard the one about the musical you leave humming the scenery; well, Big River is the one from which you emerge hurrahing the sets. …

But, finally, is this musical trip down the Mississippi, fun as it frequently is, really recessary? Rereading a few random pages of the book [Huckleberry Finn], I was tickled and shaken as I seldom, if ever, was by the show. As T. S. Eliot noted in his introduction to the novel, there is a River God in it, and it is Man's subjection to him "that gives to Man his dignity." Nothing in Big River is that big, that divine; and, to go on with Eliot, "Without some kind of God. Man is not even very interesting."

Conversely, what makes Larry Kramer's imperfect The Normal Heart—the second play this season about AIDS—so compelling is its sense of urgency, necessity, a cause. Like William M. Hoffman's As Is, it is written out of an inner compulsion that goads it on, rushes it over and past minor and not so minor flaws, makes it stick in the craw if not the heart—though sometimes in that, too. This is no more or less artful transposition of somebody else's Mississippi, but generates its own river of indignation and anger, fear and love, sometimes incontinently overflowing its banks, sometimes bogging down at mudbanks, but generally sweeping us along with it.

Kramer's play—probably more autobiographical, informed, and data-filled, but also more intemperate and biased—is less literate and poetic than As Is, but more rousingly polemical, more politically and morally challenging. It concerns, first, the troubled involvement of Ned Weeks, a writer, with an AIDS-crisis organization he helped found but that eschews his confrontational tactics and eventually dumps him. It concerns, second, Ned's love affair with Felix, a New York Times fashion reporter, who comes out of the closet for Ned even as Ned comes out of emotional lethargy for him. There is, third, Ned's tricky relationship with his heterosexual lawyer brother, made trickier by their Jewishness. Fourth, there are the efforts of Dr. Emma Brookner—a smart, tough, tireless doctor confined to a wheelchair by polio—to combat AIDS, succor the victims, and mobilize the purblind or adversary medical powers that be. Lastly, there is the complex interaction—or inaction—of city and federal governments; the vagaries of the heterosexual and homosexual press; public opinion or apathy or hostility; and violently conflicting views and plans of action in the crisis center.

The play's most original contribution is its examination of the relationship between promiscuity and AIDS, a certain swinging homosexual life-style and the spread of the disease. Although the author's preference is for loving monogamy, persuasive spokesmen for a whole spectrum from abstinent celibacy to extreme indulgence as a supposed homosexual hallmark are given hearing. As a result, what could have been a mere staged tract—and, in its lesser moments, is just that—transcends often enough into a fleshed-out, generously dramatized struggle, in which warring ideologies do not fail to breathe, sweat, weep, bleed—be human. Despite some awesome self-importance, there is also a leaven of humor and self-criticism, and language that can rouse itself out of a tendency to creak into moving arias and duets of passion.

The production sagely espouses simplicity. Eugene Lee and Keith Raywood's set is spare if not downright stark, Natasha Katz's lighting is duly untender and enlightening, Bill Walker's costumes are pointedly minimal. Michael Lindsay-Hogg has directed with pared-down directness in which every detail gets its exact due: we can choke back our sobs over a gallant death, but cry rightly over a carton of spilt milk. I admired the performances of Brad Davis, William DeAcutis, Philip Richard Allen, and several others, but was bowled over by those of D. W. Moffett and Robert Dorfman. Only Concetta Tornei, as the solid rock of a doctor, seemed more mineral than human. If you ask me which of the two plays about AIDS you should see, I can only say, "Both!"