Review: Larry Kramer’s play ‘The Normal Heart’ is in good hands at Redtwist Theatre

Thanks to tens of thousands in city funding, Redtwist Theatre has a spiffily renovated storefront theater on historic West Bryn Mawr Avenue, replete with an upgraded black-box performance space, a comfy lobby and a new cafe. “Storefront” is an adjective applied to many theater spaces in Chicago but Redtwist’s fully deserves the name: it’s sufficiently small that, for the current show at least, the audience is seated in single rows, up against the wall.

I was somehow thinking about the space Sunday when we got to the part of Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart,” a masterful, autobiographical work that charts the shockingly pathetic initial response from the New York authorities to the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s, when the directors of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a group of stressed volunteers doing the job government should have been doing, are finally told that New York Mayor Ed Koch has come up with some money for a space for them to meet.

They get a pathetic $9,000 to assuage the deaths of thousands of young men, many of them artists, struck by a virus that has become a death sentence. Government, we might discern from that, has improved.

For those of us who lived through the AIDS era and lost people we loved, “The Normal Heart” is always an experience awash with memories. Back in 2011, I remember seeing the superb Broadway revival with Joe Mantello, Jim Parsons and Ellen Barkin and thinking, well, that’s that and I’ll never see a better production. The late playwright, who I met a number of times in the 1990s when he was working at the Bailiwick Arts Center, could be seen out on West 45th Street, handing out flyers to patrons who did not recognize him. He was determined to maintain his activist stance on a crisis he did not believe had concluded.

But that notion forgets how great plays interact with the passing years and, as the years have flown by, “The Normal Heart” has become a portrait of a particular place at a particular time, perhaps, but has lost none of its resonance. Director Ted Hoerl’s simple new Redtwist production is not a perfect show; “The Normal Heart” has many scenes and the prosaic transitions here are slow, slowing the requisite drive and lengthening the running time. We don’t need the insertion of archival TV footage; Kramer explained what was going on perfectly well.

That said, when it comes to the things that really matter in the theater, this production packs a huge emotional wallop. I knew we were safe in the hands of actors who understood what the play meant in the first couple of minutes; “The Normal Heart” begins with the discovery of a personal health crisis and you immediately know if the performers can connect these events to the past and to themselves. Here, they can.

There are two notably fine performances among a solid ensemble. One is from Tamara Rozofsky, who plays the pioneering doctor, Emma (modeled after the real Dr. Linda Laubenstein and a portrait of loving pragmatism).The other flows beautifully from Zachary Linnert who plays the New York Times reporter Felix (perhaps based on John Duka), the lover of the play’s authorial alter-ego, Ned (Peter Ferneding).  Linnert’s scene with Christopher Meister, who plays Ned’s estranged but loving brother, moved me greatly, being a beautifully crafted encapsulation of the fragility of all human life.

Kramer was an unwavering activist who dedicated the last half of his life to agitating and irritating officials and media figures he deemed unforgivably compromised by fear or prejudice, shame or disdain. But he had a remarkably clear-eyed viewed of himself. As a portrait of the necessity for activism and the price it invariably extracts, I don’t think his dramatic history of AIDS will ever be equalled.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com

Review: “The Normal Heart” (3 stars)

When: Through Sept. 29

Where: Redtwist Theatre, 1044 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.

Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes

Tickets: $35 at www.redtwisttheatre.org