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Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart will be performed by the The Necessary Theatre in a series of runs to be held at The PETA Theater Center in the month of June. The Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA) partners with LoveYourself in a collaborative endeavor combining theater and HIV awareness and advocacy. Discussions on HIV/AIDS to facilitate the audience’s comprehension of the play will be conducted by LoveYourself volunteers after the performance with the aim of creating dialogue and awareness on the state of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Philippines. The Normal Heart’s plot, set in 1980s New York, revolves around the efforts of Ned Weeks, a writer and gay activist who struggles to establish an organization focused on raising awareness on what was then an unidentified disease that seemed to target homosexual men. The play highlights multiple issues, from the personal to the political, from the cultural to the biomedical. Characters in the play include a doctor/researcher wh...

by Jay Fernando (Note: The opinions expressed in this review do not necessarily reflect the views of LoveYourself.) “We must love one another or die.”   W.H. Auden hated that line and struck it out of the poem he wrote where the phrase The Normal Heart came from. But the line remained on various published versions of the poem and these words must have resonated with Larry Kramer, playwright of The Normal Heart when he wrote that powerful exchange between Ned Weeks and his brother Ben as Ned confronted him about his homophobia:      BEN: Agreeing that you were born just the same as I was born isn't gonna save your dying friends.      NED: That is exactly what is going to save my dying friends! This may be debated upon – that it is an incessant belief that homosexuality is a crime and a disease that is killing us off and not HIV – is only one among the various points made by the play, arguments that could not be resolved overnight .  It wasn't abou...