The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me: Two Plays Read Online Free PDF Page A

is an American epic, a wandering without a homecoming. We haven’t aged sufficiently as a community, or as a nation, even to imagine what the homecoming will be like. The doom that haunts every American epic is here made manifest in a plague, which has now grown to globally holocaustal dimensions: fifty million infected, sixteen million dead, ten percent increases in new infections every year. And still there is no cure, still there is mendacity and calumny and malign neglect and hatred for the Other—gay, female, black, brown, yellow, non-American, poor. And still there are the epic virtues, still there is astonishing courage, generosity,nobility and heroism, still the grand battles to change the world and the order of things, still the refusal to accept inujustice, blind destiny, even fate. This doom and these virtues are given full-blooded stage life in
The Normal Heart
and
The Destiny of Me.
Together the plays constitute an American epic, improbably and perhaps accidentally of the theater. Their vision is individual and deeply communal. It is tragic and unceasingly generative. Its characters are possessed of a stammering eloquence, and what they speak is uncomfortable, outrageous, abrasive, brave: the truth. These plays give the lie to a theater of diminished expectations and humbled ambitions. Here is theater that has managed to matter, the work of a deep-diving heart as hot as the sun.
    —Tony Kushner
New York City
June 2000

The Normal Heart

For Norman J. Levy,
    who succeeded where all others failed.

The windiest militant trash
    Important Persons shout
    Is not so crude as our wish:
    What mad Nijinsky wrote
    About Diaghilev
    Is true of the normal heart;
    For the error bred in the bone
    Of each woman and each man
    Craves what it cannot have,
    Not universal love
    But to be loved alone.
    All I have is a voice
    To undo the folded lie,
    The romantic lie in the brain
    Of the sensual man-in-the-street
    And the lie of Authority
    Whose buildings grope the sky:
    There is no such thing as the State
    And no one exists alone;
    Hunger allows no choice
    To the citizen or the police;
    We must love one another or die.
    From “September 1, 1939”
                   W. H. Auden

Acknowledgments
    Theater is an especially collaborative endeavor. Many people help to make a play.
    I would like to thank: Arthur Kramer (as always), A.J. Antoon, Ann and Don Brown, Michael Callen, Michael Carlisle, Joseph Chaikin, Kate Costello, Dr. James D’Eramo, Helen Eisenbach, Dr. Roger Enlow, Tom Erhardt, Robert Ferro, Emmett Foster, Jim Fouratt, Sanford Friedman, Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien, Dr. Patrick Hennessey, Richard Howard, Jane Isay, Dr. Richard Isay, Chuck Jones, Owen Laster, Dr. Frank Lilly, Joan and David Maxwell, Rodger McFarlane, Patrick Merla, Hermine and Maurice Nessen, Mike Nichols, Nick Olcott, Charles Ortleb, Johnnie Planco, Judy Prince, Margaret Ramsay, Mary Anne and Douglas Schwalbe, Will Schwalbe, Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, and Tim Westmoreland.
    I particularly thank my intelligent cast, and our director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, a humble, gentle man of great patience and courage.
    I give special thanks and tribute to Dr. Linda J. Laubenstein.
    I am grateful to the following works of scholarship: “American Jewry During the Holocaust,” a report edited by Seymour Maxwell Finger for the American Jewish Commission on the Holocaust, Hon. Arthur J. Goldberg, Chairman, March 1984 (the excerpt quoted herein is used by permission);
Israel in the Mind of America
by Peter Grose, Alfred A. Knopf, 1983;
American Jewry’s Public Response tothe Holocaust, 1938-44:
An Examination Based upon Accounts in the Jewish Press and Periodical Literature, A Doctoral Dissertation by Haskel Lookstein, Yeshiva University, January 1979, University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan;
While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy,
by Arthur D. Morse, copyright © 1967, The Overlook Press, Woodstock, New York, 1983;
The Abandonment of the Jews: