Toto Too theatre 2018 Archives - Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

Toto Too examines the politics of the Aids crisis

By Jamie Portman | March 3, 2018

The Normal Heart by Larry Kramer, a Toto Too Production. Directed by Jim McNabb and Shaun Toohey

Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart is a play fuelled by anger.

Anger at the political, medical and media establishment of the day for its reluctance to accept the reality of a mounting AIDS epidemic.

Back in 1985, Kramer made enemies on all sides with a play that is an only slightly fictionalized account of his real-life efforts in New York City to awaken the prevailing culture — including a gay, closeted mayor — to the reality of the frightening plague enveloping it. And because it takes no prisoners in its indictment, it remains perhaps the most unsettling play to emerge from the AIDS era

Kramer’s dramatic alter ego in the play is an outspoken crusader named Ned Weeks — and Shaun Toohey’s performance in this role supplies ample reason to take in TotoToo Theatre’s sometimes uneven revival of a seminal late 20^thCentury stage classic. …

The Normal Heart: some solid performances in this sometimes rocky production

By Iris Winston | March 3, 2018

The Normal Heart
Photo Maria Vartanova

The Normal Heart by Larry Kramer, Toto Too theatre, directed by Jim McNabb and Shaun Toohey.

A friend smiled as he recalled the late 1970s as a wonderful time of emotional and sexual freedom. We had met for lunch after his weekly doctor’s appointment. He reported that he had lost a little weight and that one or two more dark marks had shown up on his body. But he was fine, he said. The year was 1990. Less than three months later, he was dead, another victim of the AIDS crisis.

By this time, the scourge of acquired immune deficiency syndrome had been recognized as an epidemic. The black, purple, brown or red marks of Kaposi’s sarcoma were understood to be signs of the dangerous progression of the killing disease.

When Larry Kramer wrote his angry autobiographical play The Normal Heart, first presented off Broadway in 1985, he was continuing his fight to make people understand and respond to the ever-increasing death toll. Yet, because AIDS in 1981 (when HIV/AIDS was officially recognized as an epidemic) and earlier primarily affected gay men, it was extremely difficult to raise political or personal awareness of the depth of the problem. And, in The Normal Heart, Kramer gives no quarter to the members of the gay community, who were too timid to fight or too hung up on sexual liberation to recognize that abstinence might stem the spread of the disease. …