STAGE REVIEW : ‘NORMAL HEART’: AIDS CRISIS

It takes an angry man to write an angry play. Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” at the Las Palmas Theatre is a broadside in dramatic form against those who failed to respond accurately to the AIDS threat three or four years ago, when its gravity should have been clear.

These include the straight world for ignoring the problem and the gay community for failing to clean up its own sexual act in the light of the problem. Specifically indicted are the mayor of New York and the New York Times. Also implicated--and this makes “The Normal Heart” something more than a broadside--is one Ned Weeks.

Weeks (Richard Dreyfuss) also is the hero of the play. Like Kramer, he has written a novel chiding his fellow gays for confusing promiscuity with liberation. The AIDS crisis further exacerbates the preacher within him, and he forms a group designed both to bring public attention to AIDS and to promote safe sex among gays--which, for the moment, means no sex.

The group has some success, but Weeks’ personal style is so abrasive that his fellow members expel him as a fanatic. (Their letter of dismissal is scathingly specific.) At the same time he loses his first real lover--as opposed to bathhouse pickup (Bruce Davison)--to the disease. Ned Weeks can’t, it seems, control the universe.

Beneath the social concerns of “The Normal Heart” is the story of a man who must learn to adjust his expectations of other men downward if he hopes to do any good among them. This is interesting. So is the play’s message that having sex with as many partners as desired is actually a kind of addiction. What play in the liberated ‘70s and ‘80s has dared to say that?

And so is the play’s presentation of gay men as men who happen to be gay, with only one character (played by William Acutis) inclining to the queenly side. “The Normal Heart” is refreshingly unexotic on this score. Dreyfuss’ tenderness with Davison is written and played in a matter-of-fact way, and will be understood that way. An angry play, it isn’t a sensational one.

Is it a good one? No. It almost doesn’t have time to be one, so intent is it on imparting its rage at the Establishment and in inspiring gays in the audience to stop playing victim--and to stop killing themselves. As an AIDS documentary, it is also already something of a period piece, thank God: The causes of the disease have been more clearly pinpointed now.

But it is a salvageable play, given a hard-headed production that won’t dawdle and that won’t give in to hysteria and self-pity. On that score the news from the Las Palmas is far from good. There are some fine actors in this play, but the casting is not on the nose, and Arvin Brown has directed with a very slack hand. Scenes that ought to be shaped and pointed drag along like an afternoon soap.

Dreyfuss would seem to be perfect casting for the feisty Ned Weeks--no one plays pop-offs better. But since “The Hands of Its Enemy,” he seems to have come down with a case of the pauses, meaning that no line gets delivered without one or two rests in the middle, to denote thoughtfulness and sincerity.

This proves catching, and a play which has great verbal energy on the page (it’s been published by New American Library) comes off as slack conversation, punctuated by bouts of hyped emotion. This is a play buzzing with ideas--not abstract ones, but ones that will literally determine whether the characters will live or die. Brown’s actors feel the play, to the bottom of their hearts--but they’re so busy feeling it that they forget to speak it. (An exception: David Spielberg as Dreyfuss’ attorney brother.)

And certain people just don’t work in certain roles. Kathy Bates was superb as the small-town suicide in “ ‘Night, Mother,” but you can’t buy her as a blunt, self-controlled New York doctor who knows where all the bodies are buried. Similarly, Vincent Caristi seems much less articulate than his lines as a gay who’s not about to give up his liberation now that he’s achieved it.

Davison is more like it as Dreyfuss’ lover, a New York Times reporter who’s very easy with himself and his sexuality--the play’s reason-speaker. He and Dreyfuss give “The Normal Heart” a sound emotional center, for all one’s frustrations in hearing it.

And D. Martyn Bookwalter’s set is splendid, just bare enough and just full enough. At climactic moments the walls become illuminated parchment, and we see hundreds of men’s names--all AIDS victims. If “The Normal Heart” keeps one name off that list, it was worth doing. But I wish it were being done better.

‘THE NORMAL HEART’

Larry Kramer’s play, at the Las Palmas Theatre. Producers: Gene La Pietra, Josh Schiowitz, Paul Randolph-Johnson, Loren Stephens, Harriet Newman Love, Van Spaulding, Larry Jans, Gil Garfield, the Montecito Company, David Knapp. Director: Arvin Brown. Scenic and light design: D. Martyn Bookwalter. Costumes: Reve Richards. Sound: Jon Gottlieb. Casting: Penny Perry. Production stage manager: Joe Cappelli. Associate producer: Elaine Ellison. With Richard Dreyfuss, Kathy Bates, Christopher Bradley, Vincent Caristi, Bruce Davison, William De Acutis, Kenneth Kimmins, Ben Murphy, David Spielberg. Plays Tuesdays-Sundays at 8 p.m., with Saturday-Sunday matinees at 2:30 p.m. Tickets $19.50-$25. 1642 N. Las Palmas. (213) 466-1767 or 480-3232.

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