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

months of the epidemic, the
New York Times
wrote about it a total of seven times:
    1. July 3, 1981, page 20 (41 cases reported by CDC)
    2. August 29, 1981, page 9 (107 cases)
    3. May 11, 1982, Section III, page 1 (335 cases)
    4. June 18, 1982, Section II, page 8 (approximately 430 cases)
    5. August 8, 1982, page 31 (505 cases)
    6. January 6, 1983, Section II, page 17 (approximately 891 cases)
    7. February 6, 1983, Magazine (the “Craig Claiborne” article) (958 cases)
    10. During the three months of the Tylenol scare in 1982, the
New York Times
wrote about it a total of 54 times:
    October 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31
    November 2, 5, 6, 9, 12, 17, 21, 22, 25
    December 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 10, 14, 15, 19, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30
    Four of these articles appeared on the front page.
    Total number of cases: 7.
    11. Government research at the National Institutes of Health did not commence in reality until January 1983, eighteen months after the same government had declared the epidemic.
    12. One entire wall contained this passage:
    “There were two alternative strategies a Jewish organization could adopt to get the American government to initiate action on behalf of the imperiled Jews of Europe. It could cooperate with the government officials, quietly trying to convince them that rescue of Jews should be one of the objectives of the war, or it could try to pressure the government into initiating rescue by using embarrassing public attention and rallying public opinion to that end.
    The American Jewish Committee chose the former strategy and clung to it tenaciously.
    From the very onset of Jewish crises, the Committee responded to each new Nazi outrage by practicing their traditional style of discreet ‘backstairs’ diplomacy.
    With each worsening event, the Committee reacted by contacting yet another official or re-visiting the same ones to call their attention to the new situation.
    The Jewish delegates were usually politely informed that the matter was being given the ‘most earnest attention.’
    They were still trying to persuade the same officials when the war ended.”
    From “American Jewry During the Holocaust,” Prepared for the American Jewish Commission on the Holocaust, 1984, Edited by Seymour Maxwell Finger
    13. Announcement of the discovery of “the virus” in France: January 1983.
    Announcement of the “discovery” of “the virus” in Washington: April 1984.
    14. The public education budget for 1985 at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: $120,000.
    15. Vast expanses of wall were covered with lists of names, much like the names one might find on a war memorial, such as the Vietnam Memorial in Washington.

Foreword
    Larry Kramer’s
The Normal Heart
is a play in the great tradition of Western drama. In taking a burning social issue and holding it up to public and private scrutiny so that it reverberates with the social and personal implications of that issue,
The Normal Heart
reveals its origins in the theater of Sophocles, Euripides, and Shakespeare. In his moralistic fervor, Larry Kramer is a first cousin to nineteenth-century Ibsen and twentieth-century Odets and other radical writers of the 1930s. Yet, at the heart of
The Normal Heart,
the element that gives this powerful political play its essence, is love—love holding firm under fire, put to the ultimate test, facing and overcoming our greatest fear: death.
    I love the ardor of this play, its howling, its terror and its kindness. It makes me very proud to be its producer and caretaker.
    —Joseph Papp

Act One
Scene 1
    The office of
DR. EMMA BROOKNER .
Three men are in the waiting area:
    CRAIG DONNER, MICKEY MARCUS ,
and
NED WEEKS .
    CRAIG: (
After a long moment of silence.
) I know something’s wrong.
    MICKEY: There’s nothing wrong. When you’re finished we’ll go buy you something nice. What would you like?
    CRAIG: We’ll go somewhere nice to eat, okay?