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Larry Kramer (photo by David Shankbone via Wikipedia)
Hollywood is a four-letter town
The long and winding road of Pulitzer- and Oscar-nominated writer Larry Kramer’s controversial play The Normal Heart which begins a U.S. national tour in June, headlines Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times Theatre this autumn and is slated to hit the silver screen in 2014, thanks to Brad Pitt
By Richard Burnett
Not everyone likes writer Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart which was crowned one of the Hundred Best Plays of the Twentieth Century by the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain.
“The Normal Cash Register – that’s what Robert Ferro called it,” my longtime mentor, the Godfather of Gay Lit, Felice Picano, told me in 2004. “It’s a terrible play. The idea of making money out of AIDS is appalling to me.”
Felice can say that because he was there when Gay men were dropping like flies in the early 1980s. “I remember the day when a friend and I were out at Fire Island and saw the sexual connections. We literally said, ‘We’re dead men.’”
Truer words were never spoken.
