The Destiny of Me: A Play in Three Acts

Funny, gutsy, and unabashedly emotional, Larry Kramer's The Destiny of Me has the power to hit us where it hurts - in the heart. AIDS activist Ned Weeks, the subject of Kramer's earlier play The Normal Heart, checks himself into an experimental treatment program run by the very doctor that his militant organization has been criticizing most. Frightened of dying from the disease, Ned finds himself fighting to get a little more time among the living - and to figure out his life. Through Kramer's use of daring stagecraft, Ned, from his hospital bed, reenters his childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, talking with the boy he once was and with whom he still hasn't come to terms. Seeing his past through the dual vision of a child's and an adult's eyes becomes a stunning revelatory experience, filled with anger and laughter, understanding and irreconcilable absurdity. All the while Ned, the patient, engages his doctor and nurse in a caustic verbal exchange about AIDS research, treatment, and activism. Stirring theater, as well as provocative, exciting reading, The Destiny of Me is great American drama, and Larry Kramer is an artist with the skill to make words, like scalpels, cut our feelings to the bone.

Kramer adopts the realistic expressionism and basic setting, a hospital room, of Arthur Miller's Ride down Mt. Morgan to explore not how Ned Weeks, like his lover Felix, who died at the end of The Normal Heart (1985), came to develop AIDS but how his family shaped his life. Ned's doctor, nurse, brother Ben, and mother Rena tend to, and exchange both barbs and condolences with, him in the play's present, while Alexander (Ned as a child, young Ned (a teenager), younger Ben, now-dead father Richard, and younger Rena re-create scenes from Ned's development into an unhappy, lonely man unable to say "I love you," and perhaps unable, he thinks, really to love anyone. Far more daring than The Normal Heart, Destiny finds Kramer in the critical mode of his satiric novel Faggots (1978). He is not carping at the foolish misbehavior of gay men, though. He is decrying the cruelties--avoidable and not--of having to grow up in families at all. But is there any other, preferable way to grow up? No? That's the point. Ray Olson