The Destiny of Me: A Play in Three Acts
Kramer adopts the realistic expressionism and basic setting, a hospital room, of Arthur Miller'sRide down Mt. Morganto explore not how Ned Weeks, like his lover Felix, who died at the end ofThe Normal Heart(1985), came to develop AIDS but how his family shaped his life. Ned's doctor, nurse, brother Ben, and mother Rena tend to, and exchange both barbs and condolences with, him in the play's present, while Alexander (Ned as a child, young Ned (a teenager), younger Ben, now-dead father Richard, and younger Rena re-create scenes from Ned's development into an unhappy, lonely man unable to say "I love you," and perhaps unable, he thinks, really to love anyone. Far more daring thanThe Normal Heart,Destinyfinds Kramer in the critical mode of his satiric novelFaggots(1978). He is not carping at the foolish misbehavior of gay men, though. He is decrying the cruelties--avoidable and not--of having to grow up in families at all. But is there any other, preferable way to grow up? No? That's the point.Ray Olson