Subject: Trio of American Plays Rooted in Reality 
Date: Published: 10/29/92 (61 lines)
Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

    LEISURE & ARTS;
    Theater:  Trio of American Plays Rooted in Reality
    ----
    By Melanie Kirkpatrick

    New York -- Three fine plays that opened off-Broadway last week
 have two things in common:  Each is a mature work by a gifted
 American playwright in his or her prime, and each belies the
 conventional wisdom that the modern theater has become irrelevant.
 These plays, by Wendy Wasserstein, Larry Kramer and David Mamet, are
 rooted in reality -- fiercely, sometimes hauntingly so.  Their
 subjects are love in middle age, AIDS and sexual harassment.  Each is
 somewhat autobiographical.

[35 lines irrelevant to AIDS omitted.  -- sysop]
 
    Mr. Kramer's "The Destiny of the Heart" is about a wildly
 different sort of family.  A memory play about the adolescence of a
 middle-aged homosexual, it is bitter and angry and full of the
 biting humor that comes not from a joy of life but from trying to
 make the best of it.
    The play is highly autobiographical.  Mr. Kramer's hero, Ned, like
 Mr. Kramer, has HIV.  Also, like Mr. Kramer, Ned is a strident AIDS
 activist.  The setting for the play is the infectious-diseases floor
 of a military hospital outside Washington, where Ned is secretly
 undergoing an experimental treatment.  Protesters roar disturbingly
 outside, as Ned and his doctor and nurse trade barbs and
 accusations.
    From his hospital bed, Ned remembers his clinging mother, his
 distant father and his over-achieving brother.  But most of all he
 remembers himself as a young man, trying to understand and then come
 to terms with being homosexual before the word gay meant anything
 other than merry.
    The power of these searing scenes is due largely to John Cameron
 Mitchell, who plays the young Ned with an ethereal grace.  The
 transformation of this vivacious, tenderhearted boy into the
 unsmiling, acerbic man in the hospital bed is the emotional core of
 the play.
    As the older Ned, Jonathan Hadary also gives a powerful
 performance.  His face remains controlled and impassive but his body
 seethes with rage.  It's hard to like him, but it's also hard not to
 admire his spirit.  There is a certain hope in the knowledge that an
 embittered man who has led a largely loveless life can find the
 strength both to fight this terrible illness and to come to terms
 with himself.  In the end, "The Destiny of the Heart" is oddly
 uplifting.
    All this said, it must be noted that the play is too long and too
 discursive.  It also has an irritating self-aggrandizing tone that
 threatens to tip the scales against Ned.  It says much of Mr. 
 Kramer's skill that he was able to keep me from pitying Ned and that
 he was able to make me admire him while not liking him, but I wish
 he had let Ned bear just a bit of the responsibility for his unhappy
 past and his illness.

[This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the
 personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the
 hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering
 from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]