A ‘Heart’-to-Hearts Talk Across the Footlights : Actors, Audience at Las Palmas Theater Grapple With a Play’s Issues Concerning the AIDS Crisis

I don’t think this play is a great play as a play. I think it is great as a fire. It is supposed to kindle something in you. I’ve been talking about AIDS for three months now, in conversations, so it’s done its job . ... I would love to play this play in front of people who don’t like gays, people who think AIDS is an efficient disease.

--Actor Richard Dreyfuss, who portrays a gay activist in “The Normal Heart”

Richard Dreyfuss and other cast members of “The Normal Heart,” along with Los Angeles clinical psychologist Rob Eichberg, decided to talk with the audience about AIDS after the Sunday-evening performance at the Las Palmas Theater in Hollywood.

They wondered what theatergoers would have to say about such a play, an angry, emotional work dealing with acquired immune deficiency syndrome. The house was filled to its 377-person capacity, and the crowd was mixed--young and elderly, male and female, gay and straight.

Eichberg, who has been active in the gay community since the mid-1970s, moderated the discussion, fielding questions from an expressive audience.

He had mailed out invitations to family, friends, clients and persons who had attended his previous workshops to come to the performance, and was pleased with their response.

“One of the unsung heroes of AIDS, to me, is Larry Kramer, who wrote this play,” Eichberg said, initiating cheers from the crowd. “Several years ago when he wrote his article (about the AIDS crisis) for Native (a publication for gays) I thought he was creating panic. I have apologized to him since. To this day, many of us are still in a state of denial (about AIDS).”

Eichberg’s mother, Shirley, said she’d persuaded about 35 of her heterosexual friends to attend, and was glad she had.

“I was pleasantly surprised, because I had read such mediocre reviews and it was really excellent,” she said afterward. “I brought a heterosexual population and they were overwhelmed by it. After it was over, I thought they had a lot more compassion.

“When you’re spending $22.50 a ticket or $45 a couple, most people don’t want to see anything that’s going to make them depressed,” Shirley Eichberg added. “That’s a sad commentary. But they really should see this to understand what’s going on.”

Through its cast of nine, each character based on an actual individual, the play portrays the frustrations and struggles the homosexual community has had in dealing with the health crisis--coming to grips with its deadliness, getting support from the heterosexual community, recognition from the media or funding from politicians to find a cure or a vaccine.

Although some of “The Normal Heart’s” material is dated--the AIDS virus has been identified, though no vaccine has been found; much more funding has come from national, state and local levels for AIDS research and education; and the media is paying attention to the crisis--many of its issues are still timely.

The play takes place from July, 1981, to May, 1984, when gays in New York were trying to get city officials and the medical establishment to go public in recognizing that AIDS was of epidemic proportions in the gay community and to do something about it.

Their pleas, playwright Kramer asserts in his script, fell on deaf ears. But, Sunday night, this audience was listening, and asking questions.

There was candor from both cast and audience.

Fear in the Community

“There is a lot of fear in our community, a lot of talk about sickness in our community,” said Barney Alfs, a member of the audience who said he was hosting in his home a visitor from New York who has AIDS. “There’s a lot of anger, too, and a lot of anger in this play. But my hope is that this is part of a healing practice for all of us. Personal responsibility and loving oneself are essential adjuncts to medical treatment.”

Several other people in the audience admitted that the play had made them angry.

A woman who identified herself as straight said she had related to the play because “its issues affect us and still make people angry.”

She also talked about how AIDS affected her life and those of her heterosexual friends. “I am more careful whom I am involved with now,” she said. “And I am looking for an intimate relationship. That’s an important issue to us.”

“Everyone should be angry when they see this play, and they should stay angry until something is finally done,” said Eric Rofe, new director of the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center in Hollywood.

One woman asked if it was true, as the script said, that New York politicians ignored the AIDS epidemic because they were afraid it would ruin tourism.

“In the play Larry accuses New York City of complicity (in the AIDS crisis),” said actor Vincent Caristi, who portrays Mickey Marcus, a promiscuous homosexual. “The analogy is the same. . . . The idea that New York City kept this quiet is an outrage. It should outrage everybody.”

Another woman asked Dreyfuss if the reference in Kramer’s script to AIDS as germ warfare or a plot by the CIA was for real.

‘Government Not Responsible’

“It’s not a serious accusation, but a reference to things that have been said,” Dreyfuss said. “My own personal feeling is that it’s paranoid to believe it happened that way. I do not believe the government of the United States is responsible for AIDS.”

Several people disagreed with Dreyfuss, saying they believed that secret government experimentation was possible in starting the epidemic.

Said Dreyfuss: “I think if you can’t discern the difference between paranoia and the politics going on, you’re in trouble.”

Dreyfuss, Josh Schiowitz, one of the play’s producers, and several members of the audience talked about the fear of quarantine of gays who have of AIDS and/or those who have tested positive as carriers of the virus. The subject is discussed in the play and has been been suggested seriously in the media on recent occasions.

In November, Dr. Vernon H. Mark, an associate professor of neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School, publicly said that he thought “sexually promiscuous” AIDS carriers should be quarantined on an island off the coast of Cape Cod that had been used as a leper colony from 1902 to 1922. The island is owned by the state of Massachusetts and is now a wildlife refuge.

In December, California Secretary of State March Fong Eu cleared for circulation a proposed 1986 ballot initiative that would permit carriers of the AIDS virus to be subject to state quarantine.

Proponents of the ballot initiative, Khushro Ghandhi, an official of Lyndon LaRouche’s Democratic Policy Committee (which has no connection with the Democratic Party), and Bruce Lutz of Los Angeles have to submit 393,385 valid petition signatures to Eu’s office by April 18 to qualify for the November, 1986, ballot.

“They are talking about quarantine, hiding of the gay community,” Dreyfuss said. “I think that’s personally what you all, we all, fear. A reawakening of a primal fear in society.”

One young man in the audience responded by saying that on a recent Monday, one of his co-workers had come into his office with a petition to quarantine AIDS patients.

“The guy who came into my office is Japanese and he can’t see what he’s doing,” he said. “It happened before here in America. It (quarantine) happened to his own parents and he can’t see it.”

Discussion Heats Up

The discussion became heated when it involved the script’s references to the similarity of ignoring the European Jews in the Holocaust to that of ignoring AIDS when it first struck the gay community.

Dreyfuss, whose character Ned Weeks delivers impassioned dialogue on the Holocaust and AIDS, bristled at one man’s question about using a comparison of the Holocaust and treatment of the gay community.

“Were you implying the analogy of the Holocaust was inappropriate?” Dreyfuss asked the man. He then asked the audience how many others thought it inappropriate, and a few hands were raised.

“I am not the author of the play, I am an actor in it,” Dreyfuss said. “But as a Jew I can only say it one way: If there is any reason for the Holocaust it is as education and it is in this play to illuminate the human experience. The Holocaust was one of the greatest, brightest, illuminatings of the Jewish experience. The specificity of the analogy should be listened to.”

Producer Schiowitz agreed with Dreyfuss. “America did the same thing with silence for the Jews in Germany,” he said. “Ignoring it, pretending it wasn’t happening. It’s the same thing here. People are saying quarantine. It can happen . . . This play is real important and I’m glad we brought it to Los Angeles. It has been like a letting of blood for me. I was brought up, ‘Don’t forget, don’t forget (the Holocaust).’ As a Jew and as a gay man I don’t want to forget that something can happen and it is happening.”

During the discussion, each cast member and three of the producers who participated were asked about their feelings for the play. They will be playing their roles here longer than first expected, since the run of “The Normal Heart” has been extended until Feb. 16. It was to end Jan. 26. Producers of the play will continue donating $1 of every ticket to direct services and research for AIDS.

Most of the actors, and one actress, Kathy Bates, who portrays an outraged New York physician, said they had not fully realized the scope of the AIDS crisis until they read or saw the play, and then were cast for it.

Paul Randolph-Johnson, a “The Normal Heart” producer and assistant director, told the audience: “Back in July, I knew nothing about AIDS. I read the script and it was abject horror. I had to walk around the block for two hours.”

“I’ve been in this play a long time,” said William De Acutis, explaining to the audience that he had played his role of the swishy Tommy Boatwright with the cast in New York before coming to Los Angeles. “I auditioned more than a year ago. I started in February and have been living it since. . . . Up until this play, AIDS to me was a cover on the New York Post. You sit in a chair and say, ‘God help us.’ But being in this play means so much.”

‘I Was Frightened’

Actor Bruce Davison, who plays Dreyfuss’ lover, a gay journalist dying of AIDS, said: “I saw the play in New York and was asked to be involved with it, but I refused. I was frightened of it. . . . I felt very confronted with the politics and the gay life style. I chose to do it here because of Dreyfuss and Brown (director Arvin Brown, who has now gone to New Haven, Conn., where the play opens this month, with Tom Hulce in the lead role). The rehearsals were really difficult, but with us now, it’s a fine honing. . . . But there are some very rough confrontations, both physical and mental.”

Dreyfuss said that he knew by the second act when he saw “The Normal Heart” in New York that he wanted to do the play, but that he had not dealt with the issues of AIDS then “on the level that I am now.”

The frank actor also talked briefly about the experience of playing a homosexual when he is not.

“I don’t think I accomplished anything in rehearsal. I intonated my words,” Dreyfuss said. “I didn’t begin to experience the play until we had the audience. Playing a gay man while not being a gay man is different in my experience. I was politicized by this play. I didn’t know that until tonight. . . . We are doing this as a way of witness, not making a lot of money. I urge you to tell your friends about it. Talk up this play, so we can serve some purpose.”