[In this review, Berman finds The Normal Heart an amateurish play, but concedes that it is "a rare instance of an atrocious political play that succeeds in clobbering home its point."]

You might almost think, after seeing the Roundabout production [of An Enemy of the People], that Ibsen has turned into a hack and that the Ibsenian age is behind us. Not true! To be persuaded otherwise, go see The Normal Heart, by Larry Kramer, at the Public. The Normal Heart is An Enemy of the People, sort of, for 1985. The Dr. Stockmann character is a gay-rights leader named Ned Weeks and the pollution crisis is AIDS. Ned's acquaintances are dying all around him and the thought dawns that neither the gay community nor anybody else is doing much about it. The issue is purely one of public health, but as Ibsen knew, there are no matters purely of public health. Ned organizes an activist committee resembling the Gay Men's Health Crisis only to discover that petty prejudices are snipping at his heels and that his own comrades, the sniveling liberals, are quailing in fright. Should the committee mail out envelopes bearing the organization's name, which includes the word gay? Impossible: the recipients will be exposed as homosexuals. But neither can the envelopes not bear the name, because without it the post office will rescind the nonprofit postal rate. A terrible epidemic is going on, and that is the sort of problem the organization must confront.

There are also some bigger problems, beginning with Mayor Ed Koch, who is practically drawn and quartered in this play, then fed to the maggots. Larry Kramer's Koch won't do anything substantial or public in response to the epidemic—won't meet with the activist organization, won't even send an aide to meet with them until months have passed and many people have died. Why? Because no one wants to be associated with a gay cause, and perhaps because, it is suggested, Koch and his aide are gay themselves and would hate to be exposed. Is there anything to these accusations? On the details, I couldn't say; but on the main point, whether Mayor Koch deserves to be drawn and quartered, no one is likely to come away from The Normal Heart thinking otherwise. For New York City has a vast number of people who belong to the AIDS risk groups and its Mayor ought to have taken the lead in generating a proper public attitude throughout the country, a determination to keep cool, yet also to grapple with the disease at whatever cost and not to pretend that nothing is happening. The Mayor of New York ought to have taken charge of the epidemic, but he hasn't done so. 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 is the least that should happen.

Like Dr. Stockmann, Ned is meant to appear two-sided, correct in his analysis of the crisis and of the need for radical action (which he thinks ought to include a campaign against promiscuity), but also shrill, intolerant and unbearable. His own organization expells him. He begins a love affair with a timid New York Times reporter who comes down with the disease, and even the lover can barely stand him. Ned's prickly personality is meant to give The Normal Heart a normal dose of poetry in the Ibsenian sense. But there's no point talking about poetry here. Considered strictly as a play, The Normal Heart is a pain in the neck. Kramer's idea of dialogue is a long rant from a pamphlet on AIDS. Each character in the organization and the doctor get a turn at howling piteously at everyone for their insensitivity. I left the theater incredulous at how amateurish was the script, how wooden the directing, how stiff the actors (except for D. W. Moffett as the Times man), how overwrought and under-imagined it all was.

Yet next day I found The Normal Heart was on my mind. It's not merely that it focuses attention on the epidemic and raises some political points, though that's not nothing. There's an eerie, whining, screechy tone to this play, which may be artless but is not without passion. The awful din of Kramer's voice goes in your ear, and you can't shake it loose again. Here, then, is a rare instance of an atrocious political play that succeeds in clobbering home its point. Ibsen could have done it better, but Ibsen isn't around.