SOURCE: "The Best So Far," in New York Magazine, Vol. 25, No. 43, 2 November 1992, pp. 101-02.

In the laudatory review below, Simon praises the dual focus on Ned and Alexander in The Destiny of Me. "As Ned and Alexander interact, flow into each other across the years, and separate again, " Simon states, "we get, in ingenious double exposure, a coming-of-age and a coming-of-AIDS play. "

In The Destiny of Me, Larry Kramer written a worthy sequel to The Normal Heart, his autobiography as Ned Weeks, writer and gay activist. In this long but absorbing play, Kramer superimposes Ned's battle with AIDS at the National Institute, under a scarcely disguised doctor figure, on his own growing up as Alexander, a precious adolescent in a middle-class, Depression-and-Holocaust-era Jewish family. The heterosexual older brother, Ben, and the somewhat flighty mother, Rena, are tolerant enough of Alexander's incipient homosexuality; but the father, Richard—a Yale...