Angels in America</Emphasis>

Journal of Medical Humanities, Vol. 19, Nos. 2/3, 1998 Strange Bedfellows: Writing Love and Politics in Angels in America and The Normal Heart Peter F Cohen As critics have worked to solidify the divisions between "first" and "second generation" AIDS plays, important similarities between texts rele- gated to opposing ends of this great divide have been rendered increasingly invisible.1 Two of the most celebrated AIDS plays written in the U.S.—Tony Kushner's Angels in America (1993) and Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart (1985)—have rarely been viewed in terms of what they have in common, in large part because of the years that separated their writing. Nonetheless, both plays contain a remarkable number of similarities, ones which can be traced to the dual commitments of their respective authors: a personal commitment to political struggle, especially in relation to AIDS (both writers were AIDS activists), and an artistic commitment to reaching out to as wide and mainstream an audience as possible.3 Kramer and Kushner ad- dress this first commitment through an explicit treatment of AIDS politics in their plays: both Angels in America and The Normal Heart raise audience consciousness as to the complicity of government players in the spread of the epidemic, as well as to the political struggles that will be necessary if the epidemic is to end. Political struggle is not a particularly popular topic, however, and what has simultaneously allowed these plays to reach broad audiences is their organization around one or more love stories, a dominant theatrical convention that can render a story about homosexuals and AIDS palatable—even recognizable—to mainstream audiences. These two plot lines—love and politics—make strange bedfellows, however.4 While the love story in literature focuses on private relations, politics is generally about public struggle. While a focus on love tends to privilege the individual and the couple, a focus on politics—and especially AIDS politics—generally privileges collective forms of action.5 Most impor- tantly, in imaginative literature about AIDS at least, love and politics possess an opposing relation to the question of narrative closure. On the 197 198 Cohen one hand, the love plot requires narrative closure: once the "lack" that drives the plot has been satisfied through the union of the lovers, complications are resolved, "happily ever after" is achieved, and the need for further narrative is over.6 Closure is important even in the case of a tragic love story—even if the love relationship ends unhappily, complications are resolved by the end of the test. In other words, once a protagonist has either succeeded or failed in finding love, a drama can end, for there is nothing else about this character's story that the audience need know. A plot having to do with political struggle around AIDS, on the other hand, must necessarily eschew narrative closure. The love plot in a drama might be resolvable (either tragically or comically) within the time frame the play affords, but unless the play contains scenes that occur in the future, the struggle against AIDS cannot be. AIDS—and the fight to end it—will continue long into the future, and if a play is to advocate the kinds of political struggles that could end the epidemic, then the closure upon which the love plot depends must be abandoned in favor of a more open ending ("The Struggle Continues" instead of "Happily Ever After").7 What all of this means, then, is that despite their attempts to write both love and politics into their plays, dramatists like Kramer and Kushner must eventually endorse one of these plot lines over the other. Angels in America and The Normal Heart make strange bedfellows in themselves. Few commentators have drawn connections between the two plays, and Kushner's play has tended to draw considerably more praise than Kramer's, especially among gay commentators.9 By viewing these two plays in relationship to their respective negotiations of love and politics, however, we can begin to map out their remarkable similarities. THE NORMAL HEART Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart opened at the Public Theater in New York City in April 1985, ran there for over a year, and has been seen aroynd the world in hundreds of productions since. The Normal Heart re- counts the history of the early epidemic in New York through the story of Ned Weeks, a fictional character modeled after Kramer who helps to form an AIDS service organization, finds a lover, and loses both in a series of sixteen scenes that take place between July 1981 and May 1984.'° Extremely conventional in terms of form, The Normal Heart's plot is also relatively straightforward. Alarmed by the appearance of a strange and often fatal disease among his gay male friends and associates, Ned Weeks, a New York City writer, makes the new epidemic his obsession. Ned helps to found an AIDS service organization, and he becomes the main mouthpiece for Emma Brookner, a physician who believes that gay men should take up Strange Bedfellows 199 celibacy until more can be learned about the epidemic. Meanwhile, Ned's personal life takes several dramatic turns. Ned feuds with his brother Ben, whom he accuses of being unable to accept fully Ned's homosexuality, and he begins a relationship with Felix Turner, a closeted reporter at the New York Times whom he meets as part of his campaign to increase media cov- erage of the epidemic. (Ned berates Felix for his unwillingness to write anything more serious than fashion columns, but Felix agrees to a date with him anyway). The second half of the play is more tragic: Felix becomes ill himself, and the board of the AIDS organization, alarmed at both Ned's confrontational style and his constant harping on celibacy, removes Ned from its ranks. Felix dies in the final scene of the play, but not before he and Ned can be joined in a deathbed marriage ceremony conducted by Emma and witnessed by Ben. Ever since its first New York production in 1985, The Normal Heart has received a tremendous amount of critical attention (both scholarly and popular), a combined effect of a number of factors: the play's status as one of the first important cultural responses to AIDS, the previous promi- nence of its author, its appeal to gay and straight audiences alike, its original New York run of over a year, and its subsequent translation and production around the world. As any survey of this critical response would indicate, however, commentators have been extremely divided over the politics of Kramer's play. On the one hand, a number of commentators have viewed The Normal Heart as a brilliant intervention into mid-1980s AIDS politics, given what they have understood to be its relentless lashing out at government and media inaction, its humanizing depiction of gay men in general and PWAs in specific, its critique of homophobia and heterosex- ism, and its attempt to inspire an activist response within the gay community.11 At the same time, other commentators have viewed Kramer's play as excessively melodramatic, reactionary in both content and form, hypocritical (at best) in its views on sex, and/or a self-glorifying and gross distortion of Kramer's own rocky involvement with the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), an AIDS service organization in New York.12 As the following analysis of The Normal Heart will reveal, a number of the arguments in favor of and opposed to Kramer's play possess critical merit.13 Given the amount of criticism that already exists on The Normal Heart, however, it is not my intention to add unnecessarily to debates that have been going on for over a decade now. What I do want to do in this section, however, is consider The Normal Heart from a different perspective, one which explains many of Kramer's authorial decisions in terms of his somewhat failed attempt to negotiate the love/politics binarism that I sketched out in the introduction to this essay. 200 Cohen My approach here represents a significant departure from previous critical approaches to the play, for many commentators (including Kramer himself) have viewed the twists and turns of The Normal Heart as Kramer's attempt to tell a particular kind of story about the early years of AIDS, or to push a particular polemic concerning activism or sex. Such an approach is not entirely without merit, but in the case of The Normal Heart, it has tended to produce an excessively heated response, especially among the play's detractors. A number of the essays cited above, for instance, criticize The Normal Heart for its distortion of the facts, as though in writing his play, Kramer set out to lie about the early years of the epidemic as a means of preserving his place in the history books.14 Similarly, David Bergman has expressed confusion over the fact that a number of the more reactionary turns in The Normal Heart seem to contradict the politics expressed in Kramer's noefictional writing.15 In both cases, such thinkieg implies that Kramer is either a liar or a fool, unable to see the ways in which he is either distorting the past or contradicting himself in writing his play. What I would like to argue, however, is something different: that such contradictions and distortions—in fact, Kramer's entire telling of his story- are influenced not so much by Kramer's political stances on particular issues like monogamy or the direction of GMHC, but by the politics of form, a politics that requires writers to choose between their love and politics plots.

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