[NEohioPAL] (no subject)

[Stephen Covey]

Ensemble Theatre's 'The Normal Heart' a moving, incendiary production chronicling birth of AIDS activism
Published: Wednesday, October 03, 2012, 9:00 AM     Updated: Wednesday, October 03, 2012, 10:57 AM
By Andrea Simakis, The Plain Dealer The Plain Dealer 

As "The Normal Heart" opens, a trio of screens mounted on the stage flashes the date (July 1981), the place (New York City Hospital) and a number ("41 cases reported"), a statistic that will grow like the cancerous purple lesions covering the bodies of Dr. Emma Brookner's patients. 
In Ensemble Theatre's moving, incendiary production of Larry Kramer's historic play -- as much a call to arms as a piece of theater in the tradition of Clifford Odets -- the screens serve not just as set pieces, but as a digital Greek chorus, explaining and accusing as the deaths of gay men mount, victims of an unnamed plague. (By the final scene, in May 1984, the number of reported cases has metastasized to 2,860.) 
First produced in 1985 by Joseph Papp during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis -- an epidemic largely ignored by mainstream media, the medical establishment and the political machine from Gracie Mansion to the White House, as Kramer points out in his darkly funny, furious script -- "The Normal Heart" became the Public Theater's longest-running hit. 
Twenty-seven years later, despite an effective drug-cocktail treatment, people are still dying of AIDS the world over -- 35 million to date. On the Ensemble stage, director Sarah May and her skilled cast have done this essential work justice, proving the play still has the power to enlighten and enrage. 
(In "A Letter From the Playwright" written in 2011 for the Broadway revival, Kramer, who helped found the Gay Men's Health Crisis and Act Up, announced that startling figure and other outrages, adding that the people, their lives and deaths, were real, "everything in 'The Normal Heart' happened." Ever the activist, the 76-year-old stood outside the theater each night, handing his message to audience members on their way out.)
 
Kramer's alter ego in "The Normal Heart" is Ned Weeks (Brian Zoldessy), a sometime screenwriter turned unlikely revolutionary. While Ned excoriates the foot-dragging establishment for not caring "if a faggot dies," he also shines a klieg light on an apathetic gay community, offending friends and enemies alike. 
He visits the equally fierce Dr. Brookner -- a terrifically no-nonsense Derdriu Ring -- to find out why so many of his friends are getting sick. 
"I hear you've got a big mouth," says Emma, crippled by a pre-Salk-vaccine bout with polio but zinging around nearly crushing toes with a mechanized wheelchair. 
"Is big mouth a symptom?" Ned says. 
"No," she replies. "A cure." 
While Emma (based on the late Dr. Linda Laubenstein of New York University Medical Center) doesn't know how the insidious disease is spread, she suggests that Kramer start preaching abstinence. 
"You want me to tell every gay man in New York to stop having sex?" he says. 
"Who said anything about just New York?" the doc shoots back.
 
It's a crackerjack scene between veteran actors, and their back-and-forth is electric. While "The Normal Heart" is filled with relationships laid uncomfortably bare -- those between lovers, brothers and friends -- the pairing of Ned and Emma is especially bracing. Both are relentless advocates incapable of using platitudes or playing politics, platonic soul mates who rub virtually everyone the wrong way.
 
As Ned, Zoldessy gives a miss-it-and-you'll-be-sorry performance, one of the best of the new season. He's an abrasive bundle of brains and neuroses, a lion in Birkenstocks. Zoldessy is an adept comedian -- "How about if we say we're going to become a cross between the League of Women Voters and the United States Marines?" he deadpans, about the grassroots group he plans to start -- and a heartbreaking tragedian, his body trembling as he cradles his fading love (a quietly wonderful Scott Esposito) in his arms. 
Bravo.  		 	   		  
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