=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Gay playwright's life is at center of haunting `Destiny of Me' By Christine Dolen Knight-Ridder Newspapers A haunting image ends Larry Kramer's ``The Destiny of Me,'' an extraordinary new play that is probably as close as anyone will come to writing a gay ``Long Day's Journey Into Night.'' After nearly three harrowing hours in which past and present swirl together, in which hurt cries out for healing again and again, a dying Ned Weeks sits, bloodied, center stage. He is cradled by his younger self, the sassy dreamer who talked back to an abusive father, who hoped for a great love he'd never find. Softly, they sing ``Make Believe,'' filling it somehow with painful longing and despair and hope. Though the image makes you weep, it is also comforting O a tender reconciliation of the warring selves that rage within us all. Tenderness, if you know the work and outraged words of Larry Kramer, is not what you expect. A founder of both the Gay Men's Health Crisis (in 1981) and the militant ACT-UP (in 1987), the 57-year-old Kramer has spent more than a decade using incendiary essays and the best of the AIDS plays O 1985's ``The Normal Heart'' O to try to wake the world up to a health crisis he views as nothing less than a holocaust. He has alienated friends and enemies, broken with both the organizations he helped start, and quite deliberately made himself a royal pain. He is a gadfly whose 1978 novel, ``Faggots,'' which criticized the confusion of promiscuous sex with love, sold well but infuriated many who believed in gay liberation. He is a lone crusader. A kind of war correspondent. Some would say a hero. Ned Weeks, the focal character of both ``The Normal Heart'' and ``The Destiny of Me'' (which manages to be both a prelude and sequel to ``The Normal Heart'') is an angry activist-journalist who is admittedly the author's onstage stand-in. But how alike are they? ``I think it was dramatically useful to make Ned Weeks more curmudgeonly than I am,'' Kramer said softly by phone from his home in Easthampton, N.Y. ``People say to me, `Oh, you're such a teddy bear.' I'm not either one. But I've got both of 'em in me.'' Though it hasn't done wonderfully at the box office, New York critics loved ``The Destiny of Me.'' Even The New York Times' Frank Rich called it ``fascinating and at times overwhelmingly powerful.'' But the critical success of Kramer's newest play, whose title is taken from the Walt Whitman poem ``Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,'' is bittersweet. For one thing, Kramer couldn't be sure he would live to finish the play. In 1988, he was hospitalized for routine hernia surgery, and it was discovered that he had severe cirrhosis of the liver, apparently from hepatitis B, and that he was HIV-positive. (Like Ned Weeks' lover in ``The Normal Heart,'' Kramer's lover died of AIDS.) Kramer's health is stable now, but he's working furiously on a long novel he's calling ``The American People'' O ``It's going to be 7,000 pages; anyone can write a short book!'' O appreciating the gift of each new day. Furthermore, though ``The Normal Heart'' has had over 250 productions in the United States alone, getting ``The Destiny of Me'' staged at all was extremely difficult. It was rejected, Kramer wrote in a New York Times essay, by both Joseph Papp and JoAnne Akalaitis of the Public Theater (which staged ``The Normal Heart''), Manhattan Theater Club, Lincoln Center, Playwrights Horizons, the American Place Theater, Second Stage, the Long Wharf, Hartford Stage, Yale Rep, South Coast Rep, the Goodman, Steppenwolf and Circle in the Square. This was no surprise to Kramer, who is nothing if not tenacious. ``It was the same with `The Normal Heart' and `Women in Love' (Kramer got an Oscar nomination for his screenplay and produced the 1970 film based on the D.H. Lawrence novel),'' he said. ``If you say anything unusual or outspoken, it makes producers nervous. They're so used to giving people what they gave 'em before. It was very painful at first. Now I can handle it. I always tell writers don't take no for an answer.'' And there is one more melancholy aspect to ``The Destiny of Me'': Originally, Brad Davis (the Hollywood actor who created the role of Ned in ``The Normal Heart'') was to play Ned, with Colleen Dewhurst playing his mother. Both died O Davis of AIDS, Dewhurst of cancer O before the play had a full production. ``They both did do it in what I hope will come to be seen as a legendary reading at Lincoln Center,'' Kramer said. ``I knew Brad was HIV-positive, but he was in good shape. Strong. He was a dynamo. ``Colleen was magisterial. She isn't at all like my mother specifically, but I didn't want a Jewish mother stereotype; I wanted a force of nature. We had two readings, and in the first, she was very robust. In the second one, she was very quiet, and we didn't know why. You had to listen carefully to what she said. She was in terrible pain, but she'd made her promise to me.'' The writing of ``The Destiny of Me,'' which is pointedly autobiographical, was protracted and very different from the creation of ``The Normal Heart.'' While ``Heart,'' too, was autobiographical, it was far more overtly political O focusing on the establishment of the GMHC O than the reflective ``Destiny of Me.'' ``The Normal Heart' was written out of sheer anger. I was going to make the world pay attention,'' Kramer said. ``I worked on `The Destiny of Me' on and off for 15 years. I've never been able to let go of it O it's `so' autobiographical. It had to be right. Every comma had to be right. I had to get my parents and brother as right as I could.'' The facts are all there in the play: Growing up in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., with a Yale-trained attorney father who couldn't abide the son he called a ``sissy'' and who responded to his loathing by hitting the boy; a loving yet remote mother who worked as a Red Cross volunteer; a beloved straight older brother who was his parents' pride. ``The Destiny of Me'' is dedicated to Kramer's brother, Arthur, called Ben Weeks in the play. If he seems more sympathetic than Ben did in ``The Normal Heart,'' Kramer said perhaps it's because ``I think we're in a better place now.'' Kramer's mother, now 93, came in from Connecticut to see the play all her friends had told her about. ``We tried to keep her from coming,'' he laughed. ``She thought it was a wonderful play. But she thought it was a work of fiction. I was a long way from her when she saw it.'' Kramer, who continues his AIDS activism more often by FAX from his home these days, is still typically blunt and skeptical about the battlefront. ``Right now, I wish the Clinton administration would do something,'' he said. ``Where is the AIDS czar he promised? He hasn't made an AIDS appointment or announced any plans. Activists haven't started screaming, but we're upping our disappointment. ``If he doesn't do something, you'll see ACT-UP anger. The danger with a `friendly' administration is that everyone says the right things, and you're all liberals, and you let them get away with a lot more. We should be protesting more, not less.'' The GMHC (which Kramer calls ``the old lady of the AIDS crisis'') and ACT-UP are ``both still around and both exhausted,'' he said. ``The GMHC is an enormous bureaucracy, very large, rich and stratified in chains of command. Lots of its employees come out of ACT-UP. They start out in street activism, then get bored or tired. It's peculiar to watch kids you've trained to confront the system become prisoners of it. ``ACT-UP is still in there kicking. I think they're looking for their next major spurt of energy.'' You might think that activists like Kramer would view celebrities who enlist in the battle against AIDS as allies. But in fact, Kramer thinks stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Magic Johnson don't do the cause much good. ``If they were well-informed and consistent, they could do a lot of good. But they drop in and drop out. It all gets exhausted. You don't hear from Liz Taylor for six months, then she'll say something terrific, then she goes away again.'' These days Kramer is working with other activists on something called the Easthampton Project; the group hopes to spur establishment of a crash federal research effort to find a cure and vaccine for AIDS. He's working on the novel and soon will pause to do the screenplay for ``The Normal Heart,'' which Barbra Streisand O ``She's like me: very nosy, asks lots of questions'' O will make into a movie for Columbia. And onstage, the Ned Weeks story may become a trilogy. He is, Kramer said quietly, ``trying to finish my writing while I can.''