STAGE REVIEW : A Cause of the Heart, With the Audience in Tow

Even with the ongoing current of news stories on AIDS and its toll, most of us can only imagine the physical and psychic damage faced by the rising number of victims.

That is not much of an insight, but it is a valid starting point for considering Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart,” a straight-ahead drama that comes close to letting us into the tight circle of fear and heartache surrounding acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

Usually viewed as much as anything else as a political tract--the lack of public concern in the epidemic’s early, monstrously mysterious stages is the connective tissue--the play nonetheless casts light on the disease’s more human consequences.

In its county premiere at Orange Coast College, where a few professional actors have joined a mostly student cast, “The Normal Heart” emphasizes the love that develops between Ned Weeks, a firebrand gay activist who rails against the New York bureaucracy and the New York Times for ignoring AIDS in the early 1980s, and Felix Turner, a fashion writer for that newspaper who contracts the disease.

Director Bill Purkiss is true to the script’s plot line that first finds Weeks (Stuart Duckworth) heading a gay organization aimed at spurring action and later being expelled by the group when his inflammatory style (which includes attacking homosexuals for their promiscuous bathhouse behavior) is seen as counterproductive.

The 1984 drama’s focus is still the escalating number of gay men who died from AIDS in the first years, when scientists were completely baffled and unable to provide any help, or even hope. This was a time when the homosexual community seemed to be the only target; it was before researchers learned that heterosexuals, especially intravenous drug users, also have much to fear.

By underlining the relationship between Ned and Felix (Paul Klees), Purkiss cements the personal side of “The Normal Heart.” What was more a cause of the mind for Ned quickly becomes a cause of the heart, and the audience is taken in tow.

Duckworth, who is the convincingly volatile center of the play throughout, takes on a higher voltage of desperation once Felix becomes a focus in Ned’s world. Duckworth flirts with excess, but generally it is an appropriate response; it helps to bring us into their constricting lives.

In Felix, Ned has a softening counterbalance to his volcanic personality, and Klees correctly plays him with a quiet self-assurance and gentleness that helps to make the love scenes between Felix and Ned so natural--and the final moments between them so affecting. Both Duckworth and Klees get steady support from the rest of the cast.

Graphic characters and situations in “The Normal Heart” has prompted OCC to issue a warning advising the easily offended to think twice about seeing it.

That may be the required protocol here, but it is unintentionally ironic. Ned Weeks, no doubt, would argue that those are just the ones who should be exposed to what’s going on around them.

‘THE NORMAL HEART’

An OCC production of Larry Kramer’s drama. Directed by Bill Purkiss. With Anthony Ramirez, Danial Combs, Stuart Duckworth, Russell Dunn, Pamela Martin, James Calleri, Mark Sanchez and Paul Klees. Sets by David Scaglione. Lighting by Janie Hopson. Plays through July 3, Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 4 p.m. in the Drama Lab theater. Tickets: $5.50 to $7. (714) 432-5880.