THE DESTINY OF ME
at the Second Unitarian Church of Chicago
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Taking its title from a line in Wait Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” The Destiny of Me is Kramer’s song of himself. It’s long, loud, more than a little self-indulgent, and bravely self-revealing, examining the roots of Kramer’s public outrage in his private pain. A pioneering AIDS activist controversial for his confrontational ways, Kramer dramatized in The Normal Heart how he cofounded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis counseling center, then was forced out for his preachy, antagonistic ways.
The memories Ned’s psychic journey unlocks offer no easy insights or quick cures: instead they prod him to further expressions of anguish, at everything from his own fear of intimacy to the inadequacies of a health care system that’s “a pile of shit run by idiots and quacks” to the years wasted on psychoanalysis in search of a “cure” for his homosexuality. By the time Ned reconciles with the boy he was (the two embrace to the strains of the “Make Believe” duet from Show Boat–what would a gay play be without at least a touch of musical-comedy camp?), Kramer has gone through three acts of traumatic self-examination–some of it harrowingly intense, some of it grimly hilarious, some of it tedious, and all of it punctuated by pungent detail. Along with Ned for the ride are his white southern doctor, Tony Delia Vita, and Nurse Hanniman, Tony’s black wife, who finds herself cast in the role of resented authority figure-heightening the sense that Kramer’s anger at the AIDS crisis is bound up with unresolved oedipal conflict. At one point Ned sardonically asks Hanniman if she isn’t bothered by the knowledge that whatever AIDS treatment her work leads to will be given almost entirely to affluent white Americans while black Africans die in multitudes; another time, Hanniman is doused with fake blood by an army of gay protestors–Ned’s “children.” (The image is echoed in the third-act climax, when an over-the-edge Ned covers himself in the contents of his intravenous plasma bottle.)
No such problem affects Raft of the Medusa, which overcomes a potentially deadly didacticism with the kind of spontaneous, intensely focused performing that’s a hallmark of the best Chicago theater. Like Destiny, this 90-minute one-act (whose title comes from Gericault’s painting of a storm-tossed life raft crowded with shipwreck survivors) brings contemporary reality and the remembered past into the same space: here the setting is a therapy group literally haunted by one of its former members who recently died of AIDS. As the dead man–a rabbinical student named Donald (David Gill)–passes in and out of the room, 11 HIV-positive people and their doctor sit in metal folding chairs trading insights, insults, fears, and grudging affection.
