The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me: Two Plays (15 page)

NED:
Felix, please don’t leave me.

BEN’
s office.
FELIX
,
with great effort, walks toward him. Though he looks terrible,
FELIX
has a bit of his old twinkle.

FELIX:
Thank you for seeing me. Your brother and I are lovers. I’m dying and I need to make a will. Oh, I know Neddie hasn’t been talking to you; our excuse is we’ve sort of been preoccupied.
It’s a little hard on us, isn’t it, his kind of love, because we disappoint him so. But it is love. I hope you know that. I haven’t very much time left. I want to leave everything to Ned. I’ve written it all down.

BEN:
(
Taking the piece of paper from
FELIX
and studying it.
) Do you have any family, Felix?

FELIX:
My parents are dead. I had a wife.

BEN:
You had a wife?

FELIX:
Yes. Here’s the divorce. (
He hands
BEN
another piece of paper.
) And I have a son. Here’s . . . she has custody. (
He hands over yet another piece of paper.
)

BEN:
Does she know you’re ill?

FELIX:
Yes. I called and we’ve said our good-byes. She doesn’t want anything from me. She was actually rather pleasant. Although she wouldn’t let me talk to my boy.

BEN:
How is my brother?

FELIX:
Well, he blames himself, of course, for everything from my dying to the state of the entire world. But he’s not talking so much these days, believe it or not. You must be as stubborn as he is—not to have called.

BEN:
I think of doing it every day. I’m sorry I didn’t know you were ill. I’ll call him right away.

FELIX:
He’s up at Yale for the week. He’s in terrible shape. He was thrown out of the organization he loved so much. After almost three years he sits at home all day, flagellating himself awfully because he thinks he’s failed some essential test—
plus my getting near the end and you two still not talking to each other.

BEN:
Ned was thrown out of his own organization?

FELIX:
Yes.

BEN:
Felix, I wish we could have met sooner.

FELIX:
I haven’t much, except a beautiful piece of land on the Cape in Wellfleet on a hill overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Ned doesn’t know about it. It was to have been a surprise, we’d live there together in the house he always wanted. I also have an insurance policy with the
Times.
I’m a reporter for the
New York Times.

BEN:
You work for the
Times?

FELIX:
Yes. Fashion. La-de-da. It’s meant to come to my next of kin. I’ve specified Ned. I’m afraid they might not give it to him.

BEN:
If he is listed as the beneficiary, they must.

FELIX:
But what if they don’t?

BEN:
I assure you I will fight to see that he gets it.

FELIX:
I was hoping you’d say that. Can I sign my will now, please, in case I don’t have time to see you again?

BEN:
This will be quite legal. We can stop by one of my associates’ offices and get it properly witnessed as you sign it.

FELIX:
My little piece of paper is legal? Then why did you go to law school?

BEN:
I sometimes wonder. You know, Felix, I think of leaving here, too, because I don’t think anybody is listening to me either.
And I set all this up as well. (
A hospital bed is wheeled into stage center by two orderlies, wearing masks and gloves.
) I understand that the virus has finally been discovered in Washington.

FELIX:
The story is they couldn’t find it, so after fifteen months they stole it from the French and renamed it. With who knows how many million of us now exposed . . . Oh, there is not a good word to be said for anybody’s behavior in this whole mess. Then could you help me get a taxi, please? I have to get to the airport.

BEN:
The airport?

FELIX:
I’m going to Rumania to see their famous woman doctor. A desperation tactic, Tommy would call it. Does flying Bucharest Airlines inspire you with any confidence?

FELIX’
s hospital room,
FELIX
lies in bed.
NED
enters.

FELIX:
I should be wearing something white.

NED:
You are.

FELIX:
It should be something Perry Ellis ran up for me personally.

NED:
(
As
FELIX
presses a piece of rock into his band.
) What’s this?

FELIX:
From my trip. I forgot to give it to you. This is a piece of rock from Dracula’s castle.

NED:
Reminded you of me, did it?

FELIX:
To remind you of me. Please learn to fight again.

NED:
I went to a meeting at the Bishop’s. All the gay leaders were there, including Bruce and Tommy. I wasn’t allowed in. I went in to the men’s room of the rectory and the Bishop came in and as we stood there peeing side by side I screamed at him, “What kind of house of God are we in?”

FELIX:
Don’t lose that anger. Just have a little more patience and forgiveness. For yourself as well.

NED:
What am I ever going to do without you?

FELIX:
Finish writing something. Okay?

NED:
Okay.

FELIX:
Promise?

NED:
I promise.

FELIX:
Okay. It better be good. (
BEN
enters the scene.
)

FELIX:
Hello, Ben.

BEN:
Hello, Felix.

(
Before NED can do more than register his surprise at seeing
BEN, EMMA
enters and comes to the side of the bed.
)

FELIX:
Emma, could we start, please.

EMMA:
We are gathered here in the sight of God to join together these two men. They love each other very much and want to be married in the presence of their family before Felix dies. I can see no objection. This is my hospital, my church. Do you, Felix Turner, take Ned Weeks—

FELIX:
Alexander.

EMMA:
. . . to be your . . .

FELIX:
My lover. My lover. I do.

NED:
I do.

(
FELIX
is dead.
EMMA
,
who has been holding Felix’s hand and monitoring his pulse, places his hand on his body. She leaves. The two order lies enter and push the hospital bed, through all the accumulated mess, off stage.
)

NED:
He always wanted me to take him to your new house in the country. Just the four of us.

BEN:
Ned, I’m sorry. For Felix. . . and for other things.

NED:
Why didn’t I fight harder! Why didn’t I picket the White House, all by myself if nobody would come. Or go on a hunger strike. I forgot to tell him something. Felix, when they invited me to Gay Week at Yale, they had a dance . . . In my old college dining hall, just across the campus from that tiny freshman room where I wanted to kill myself because I thought I was the only gay man in the world—they had a dance. Felix, there were six hundred young men and women there. Smart, exceptional young men and women. Thank you, Felix.

(
After a moment,
BEN
crosses to
NED
,
and somehow they manage to kiss and embrace and hold on to each other.
)

THE END

A Play in Three Acts

For my brother,

Arthur Bennett Kramer.

“I guess you could have lived without me.

I never could have lived without you.”

Thank you.

I love you.

I would like to thank Sanford Friedman, Bill Hart, and Morgan Jenness for their invaluable dramaturgical contributions; and Dr. Suzanne Phillips, Dr.Joseph Sonnabend, Dr. Howard Grossman, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Robert Gallo, and Richard Lynn for answering my hundreds of medical questions.

L.K.

The Destiny of Me
opened on October 20, 1992, at the Lucille Lortel Theater in New York City. The Circle Repertory Company (Tanya Berezin, Artistic Director) production was presented by Lucille Lortel. It had the following cast:

Cast of Characters

(
in order of appearance.
)

Ned Weeks
     Jonathan Hadary

Nurse Hanniman
     Oni Faida Lampley

Dr. Anthony Della Vida
     Bruce McCarty

Alexander Weeks
     John Cameron Mitchell

Richard Weeks
     David Spielberg

Rena Weeks
     Piper Laurie

Benjamin Weeks
     Peter Frechette

Director
     Marshall W. Mason

Sets
     John Lee Beatty

Costumes
     Melina Root

Lighting
     Dennis Parichy

Original Music
     Peter Kater

Sound
     Chuck London & Stewart Werner

Production Stage Manager
     Fred Reinglas

Originally produced in association with
     Rodger McFarlane and Tom Viola

Place: Just outside Washington, D.C.

Time: Autumn, 1992.

As with all plays, I hope there are many ways to design
The Destiny of Me.

The original New York production turned out to be much more elaborate than I’d conceived it in my head as I wrote it. As I worked with the director, Marshall Mason, I began to fear I’d written an undesignable play (not that there should ever be such a thing!).

On
The Normal Heart
I’d had the talent of the enormously gifted Eugene Lee, ever adept at solving problems of this nature in miraculously ingenious ways, and ways that were not expensive. I suspect that Eugene’s design for
The Normal Heart
—-the way he solved not dissimilar problems—has been utilized unknowingly all over the world, just from the participants in one production seeing photographs of another.

This time, and it was also a great gift, I had the opportunity to work with John Lee Beatty, who’d designed many of Marshall’s other productions. John Lee is another kind of theatrical genius, as obsessed with minute details as Eugene is off-the-cuff. Our set was a realistic, technical marvel, with the scenes from the past zipping in and out on clever winches. We even had a sink on stage, with running water, so that the doctors and nurses and orderlies who were constantly coming into the hospital environment could wash their hands, as they would in a real hospital.

The elaborate apparatus for the medical treatment Ned is undergoing, as well as everything having to do with blood, was also worked out meticulously. I have not, in this published version, completely detailed all this medical minutiae, or the comings and goings of the nonspeaking hospital staff that the availability of a group of young Circle Rep interns allowed us to utilize in peopling our stage. Nor have I gone into too much detail about how the blood machinery looked and worked, beyond cursory descriptions.

I guess what I’m saying, and hoping, is that a lot of inventive ways will be found to deal with any problems designing and producing my play might raise—that there is no
right
way, and that, as in all theater, imagination is also one of the actors, and there are many ways to play the part.

A note about the songs Alexander sings to taunt his father in Act I: it is not essential that these be the particular songs, so long as the songs used are from this era, which is the end of World War II.

There are, for instance, a great many other Andrews Sisters’ songs, available now on numerous CDs. I happen to be very fond of ‘Victory Polka,’ but it’s hard to locate the Time-Life Music CDs that contain the only recording I know of it (the second CD or fourth cassette of the album: ‘V-Disc, The Songs that Went to War, World War I Fiftieth Anniversary Collector’s Edition’).

The
South Pacific
songs are available on both the original Broadway cast recording or the soundtrack album of the film. The songs from
Show Boat
(’Where’s the Mate For Me’ and ‘Make Believe’) as well as the brief exchange of dialogue are best represented on the complete EMI
Show Boat
(CD 7491082) or (my favourite) on the soundtrack from the MGM film,
Till the Clouds Roll By
(Sony CD AK 47029).

I began arranging for the production of
The Destiny of Me
when I thought I was shortly going to die. It’s a play I’ve been working on for years—one of those “family” slash “memory” plays I suspect most playwrights feel compelled at some point to try their hand at in a feeble attempt, before it’s too late, to find out what their lives have been all about. I figured it would be the last words of this opinionated author.

Not only did I think my play would be done while I was on my deathbed or after, I decided I would definitely leave word that it would not be done while my mother, who is now approaching ninety-three, was still alive. I certainly didn’t want to be around to discover how she would react to the portrayal, by her fifty-seven-year-old homosexual son, of some fifty years of
her
life.