THEATER REVIEW : Era of Anguish : Story from the front lines in the early years of the AIDS crisis feels dated.

Some activists on the AIDS prevention front have recently noted that watching Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart,” his highly personalized account of the years from 1981 to 1984 when the disease was forced out of the medical closet, didn’t make them feel as if they were watching ancient history.

Instead, for these people, Kramer’s cri de coeur was a boost. “The Normal Heart” is partly about how activists squabble and organize, love and organize, give up hope, then organize some more. Activists of any cause would naturally find this play a boost, because they’re seeing themselves onstage.

For those of us perhaps less active, “The Normal Heart” may feel like a newspaper play, with the paper getting pretty yellowed. That’s certainly the feeling with director Ekta Monica Lobo’s staging at the Whitefire Theatre on the play’s 10th anniversary.

In many ways, Kramer himself didn’t intend this work to last for the ages, but to have the immediacy and anger of a broadside. Place his script in a time capsule, unearth it in 100 years, and you would get a sense of the early-’80s period when news of gay men dying by the hundreds was buried in the papers. (Kramer really has it in for the New York Times.)

Watch it now on the Whitefire stage, though, and what you see is a piece of crude dramaturgy in which Kramer’s alter ego, Ned Weeks (Robert Bakkemo), and his doctor friend, Emma Brookner (Danika Kohler), deliver diatribes best suited for street rallies. Not surprisingly, Lobo’s young cast can’t make them sound like more than diatribes. And none of it is helped by an ugly stage “design” composed of pieces of furniture and an enveloping black curtain.

Basically, Ned and Emma go through the play feeling that nobody is listening: For Ned, it’s fellow gay activists who find him harsh, uncompromising and impossible; for Emma, it’s health officials who won’t take her research of the then-unknown disease seriously. Ned’s problem is by far the more interesting, especially as he falls in love with Felix (Nicholas Leigh), a Times reporter who later becomes ill with AIDS.

At one moment melodrama, another moment information pamphlet, “The Normal Heart” simply will not coalesce. What does work best are the debates between Ned and his cohorts, especially Ned’s insistence that gay men have to cease being promiscuous. Mickey (Kerr S. Lordigyan) responds that open sex has been precisely gay men’s door to freedom. Ten years after the fact, we know who has won this debate.

Bakkemo debates well, and also convincingly portrays an uptight man better at running movements than his personal life. Leigh effectively shows Felix turning from a snide journalist into a lover into a dying man. G. Tucker Foreman as Ned’s boring lawyer brother is, well, boring, while Kohler stumbles through her speeches.

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WHERE AND WHEN

What: “The Normal Heart.”

Location: Whitefire Theatre, 13500 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks.

Hours: 8 p.m. Thursday to Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday. Ends May 14.

Price: $12; $9 students with I. D.

Call: (213) 466-1767.