The first thing you hear at the start of Larry Kramer’s new play at the WPA is a recording of Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.” Listening to the words of the song and knowing anything at all about the author of “Just Say No,” it’s hard not to interpret the lyrics as a personal statement from the playwright. Mr. Kramer is the notoriously embattled gay activist whose controversial play “The Normal Heart” managed to offend so many people when it opened at the Public Theatre in 1985, and “My Way,” with its Je ne regrette rien ethos, might very well be his theme song. “The Normal Heart,” set in New York in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, sought to take various groups of people to task—the media, the city government, homosexuals—for failing to issue or heed warnings that might, Kramer felt, have stopped or slowed the spread of the disease. Ironically, the play’s fate mirrored that of its abrasive hero, who was forever alienating those he most wanted to persuade. It offended many in the gay community, who felt that Kramer was criticizing their way of the life and urging them to impose strictures on their hard-won freedoms. Others, with a less personal stake in the matter, thought Kramer was going too far in seeming to blame the entire epidemic on Mayor Koch and the New York Times. And there were those who simply found the play unpleasantly shrill.
Shrill it certainly was. “The Normal Heart” was no pleasure to sit through, but it is the only play I’ve ever seen that made me think that theatre as propaganda might have some value. Quite simply, it made you fall in love with a character who was going to die of AIDS—thereby humanizing a phenomenon too alien and frightening to think about. The play was raucous and strident and, moreover, so sprawlingly conceived as to have no real validity as a play—except that a theatre, at that time, was the only place where you could address certain issues. Things happened very fast that year; one moment there was no such things as an “AIDS play,” the next moment there was. Within weeks, it seems, a whole genre sprang up. But the play that opened at the Circle Rep a month or so before “The Normal Heart” and subsequently moved to Broadway—William Hoffman’s “As Is”—wasn’t really about AIDS, any more than it was about gun control. Its doomed hero could have been dying of anything; the audience could weep facile tears and leave undisturbed. “The Normal Heart” showed you the lesions and the fear and the spilled milk. It wasn’t by any means a good play, but it was what was wanted at the time.
Confronted with Kramer’s new play, I feel a little like one of the characters in his last: repulsed by the abusive rhetoric of someone wanting to convince me of something. “Just Say No” is an attempt to mix boulevard comedy with political satire by representing a number of barely disguised public figures and involving them in an old-fashioned sex farce along the lines of “No Sex Please, We’re British.” The play is set in the fictional city of Georgetown, capital of “New Columbia,” in the home of one Foppy Schwartz (David Margulies), an aging aesthete and libertine who runs his elegant town house like a brothel and earns his bread taking rich, prominent women to parties. Numbered among Foppy’s intimates are the trimly dressed First Lady of the land (Kathleen Chalfant), who runs the nation from a cellular phone and likes to consult an astrologist; her ballet-dancer son (Richard Topol), who desperately wants to come out of the closet; a fabulously wealthy man (Richard Riehle) who shares the name of a well-known department store and suffers a stroke while in a compromising position with his mistress (Julie White); the loudmouthed mayor of a large Northeastern city (Joseph Ragno); and the mayor’s former lover, a gentle young man named Gilbert (Keith Reddin). For various unconvincing reasons (most of them having to do with sex), these characters all converge in Foppy’s home. There is much talk of a Supreme Court decision curtailing the rights of homosexuals and much talk of a pornographic videotape that someone has made. The videotape depicts various high government officials misbehaving. The good guys, the ballet dancer and Foppy’s wisecracking maid (Tonya Pinkins), want to use it to bring down the government; the bad guys, the First Lady and the mayor, want it suppressed. The only morally ambiguous figure is Foppy, who stands to lose his social position if he tells what he knows. In the end, evil triumphs over good: Foppy is made to toe the line, the First Son is pushed back into the closet, and Gilbert is made to take the rap for a murder he didn’t commit. Thus, the honest are made to conform to the dictates of the powerful, the parasite flourishes, and the most vulnerable character is turned into a fall guy.
All this may be an accurate expression of Kramer’s world view, but it hardly qualifies as either political satire or farce. Farce is supposed to be light, political satire daring. Farce has a rudimentary, mechanical cleverness that relies on split-second timing. In David Esbjornson’s production, there is much physical movement, and every door in Edward T. Gianfrancesco’s set gets slammed several times, but nothing about the play is structurally clever. And the discoveries Kramer’s play makes—that corruption and sexual hypocrisy exist among the rich and powerful—wouldn’t shock a nun. What would shock a nun—the vulgar costumes and sight gags, the Christopher Street paraphernalia—would offend anyone more interested in ideas than in body parts and functions.
Part of the problem with Kramer’s play seems to be a confusion about what sorts of things are intrinsically funny and what sorts of things qualify as political commentary. Kramer seems to think that Miss Chalfant has only to enter and strike a photo-opportunity pose to make us roar with knowing laughter; but mimicry isn’t satire, any more than the fact that your play expresses the idea that life under certain administrations is a farce means that you have necessarily written a farce. If Miss Chalfant and Mr. Ragno are genuinely funny in their portrayals of a promiscuous First Lady and a sexually voracious mayor—and they occasionally are—it’s because their performances suggest something more general than personal insult. Had there been anything even remotely clever about “Just Say No”—some mechanism unifying Kramer’s plot and theme, or a mode of thought whose wit and subtlety made his targets look foolish—the play might have been effective to some degree. But there’s no real connection between his quarrel with those in power (their indifference to AIDS) and his main charge (that they are licentious). His jokes, moreover—endless streams of bad puns and topical one-liners—amount to the adult equivalent of bathroom humor.
If “The Normal Heart” was moving partly for the bravery with which it undertook to engage certain issues, it was also interesting for the portrait it offered of a man frustrated by his own character in his desire to persuade people of something. In “The Normal Heart,” the figure of the embattled missionary was embodied in the play. It’s sad to find that in the case of “Just Say No” that conflict is present only in the figure of the playwright himself, who seems to have given up trying to engage the issues and is just screaming behind the scenes.
Mimi Kramer The New Yorker, November 7, 1988