Canonizing Kushner

+ See the Guthrie’s listings of Tony Kushner events + Listen to Mpls.St.Paul Magazine’s Arts & Entertainment Editor Tad Simons interview Tony Kushner.

To hear Tony Kushner tell it, the life of an Emmy-Obie-Tony-Pulitzer-winning playwright is not all dinner parties and award ceremonies. There are photo shoots to endure, speeches to deliver, interviews to tolerate, and any number of other distractions from the solitary slog of writing. There is also the matter of making enough money to live, which even a playwright of Kushner’s stature has difficulty managing.

“People have insane fantasies about how much money I make,” Kushner tells me over dinner at Beppe, an Italian restaurant in New York’s Greenwich Village. It’s the evening before he will accept the first-ever Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, an honor that comes with a $200,000 check, the largest award ever given to an American playwright. “I’m not complaining,” he says, knowing full well that he is the envy of every playwright in the land. “But in the course of my professional life I’ve only had one hit play. A play , mind you, not a musical. It’s not Wicked .”

That play, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes , won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993, ran for 367 performances on Broadway, toured nationally, and was subsequently adapted for an HBO mini-series. An epic seven hours long, Angels in America is considered one of the most significant dramatic achievements of the 20th century, a play that grappled fearlessly with issues of gay rights and AIDS and became an iconic rallying cry for the entire gay rights movement.

Photo by Steve Henke

Since then Kushner has written several other plays as well as the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s film Munich, about the 1972 Olympic hostage crisis. He’s also been working on a movie script for Spielberg about Abraham Lincoln, but Kushner swears his heart is still in the theater. Which is good, because Guthrie artistic director Joe Dowling is making a bold bet on Kushner. Starting this month, Dowling turns over the entire Guthrie—including all three of its theaters—to Kushner’s work for a full 10 weeks.

The Guthrie’s Kushnerthon includes three different productions—the Tony–winning Caroline, or Change , the world premiere of a new Guthrie–commissioned play called (take a breath) The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures , and a program of short plays dubbed “tiny Kushner.” Twin Citians can also attend seminars, lectures, discussions, and film screenings of all things Kushner; a 24-hour public reading of Kushner’s entire body of work; guest lectures by such luminaries as The New York Times columnist and former theater critic Frank Rich; and an address by Kushner himself, who says he is flattered by the attention but, self-deprecating mensch that he is, concedes that it’s all “a bit much.”

Indeed, nothing quite like the Guthrie’s Kushner Celebration has been attempted by a theater. Shakespeare may get his festivals, but no institution has ever lavished so much attention on a living playwright, especially someone who, at 52, still has decades of typing ahead of him. It may be too early to officially canonize Kushner as one of America’s greatest playwrights (after all, he’s not dead yet), but the Guthrie’s event will certainly help solidify his reputation as the premier playwright of his era. In fact, Dowling didn’t consider anyone else for this project. Kushner was his first and only choice.

“I wanted to celebrate a contemporary American writer, and Tony Kushner is the preeminent playwright of his generation, there’s no question,” says Dowling. (You David Mamet fans will have to fight it out.) “I also wanted someone whose work, when combined with the discussion around it, would be more than the sum of its parts.”

Any new play by Kushner is an important occasion in the theater world, and the Twin Cities premiere of The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide (along with all the other fanfare of the Kushner Celebration) will inevitably attract national attention. This, too, is part of the plan, since the desire to create events on such a grand scale was one reason the new Guthrie was built in the first place. “With all three theaters dedicated to Kushner, we have the opportunity to acquaint audiences with the depth and breadth of work by a major American talent,” says Dowling, who in the future hopes to organize similar events around other writers, including Shakespeare.

Dowling likens Kushner to George Bernard Shaw in terms of his willingness to engage American culture on many levels—as an artist, cultural critic, and public intellectual. “Shaw was a man of enormous intellect, but he wore it quite lightly. He could also tell a good joke,” says Dowling. “So can Tony. His plays are enormously entertaining, full of engaging characters and human emotions, but—like Shaw’s—they’re packed with ideas that make you think. Tony is also a polemicist, and it’s refreshing to hear from someone who knows exactly what he thinks and isn’t afraid to say it.” Even if, as Dowling expects, “some of our patrons aren’t going to like what he has to say.”

Kushner doesn’t like to talk about works in progress. All he’ll say about his new play is that The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide is set in Brooklyn, involves an Italian family, takes place over the past five years, and is very complex. The story will involve gay Americans, he says—the first time in 15 years that he’s written about homosexuality—“but it’s a very different play from Angels in America , because I’m a very different person, and it will definitely reflect that.”

The Roots of Caroline As part of her research for Caroline, or Change, Guthrie director Marcela Lorca traveled to Lake Charles, Louisiana, and visited Kushner’s childhood home, where she met the woman upon whom Caroline’s character is based. Her name is Maudi Lee Davis, and she still works part-time for the Kushners. Says Lorca: “After [Hurricane] Katrina, what attracted me to the play was that it begins with this eerie song about water everywhere, and there are images of water and being underwater throughout the play. But I was also fascinated by how the objects in Caroline’s world come alive. This is Louisiana, with the humidity, perfume in the air, frogs and crickets—nature is exuberant. Lake Charles is in this swampy land, with all these creatures, like shrimp that make these weird piles of mud—it’s incredible. You can see Tony’s imagination at work as a child, where objects like washing machines talking to her—they are her trusted friends.”

It’s late October in New York City, and a brief cloudburst has cleansed the air, bringing with it a crisp Canadian chill. The ceremony for the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award is scheduled for 6 pm, after cocktails and schmoozing on the rooftop garden of one of Rockefeller Center’s smaller buildings. The garden has a maze of hedges and flowerbeds, a few small pine trees, a fountain, and a carpet of lush, thick grass. If it weren’t for the surrounding forest of concrete and glass, you’d swear you were somewhere in Europe, somewhere nice, where important people gather to drink martinis and gossip. On the famous ice rink at Rockefeller Plaza, skaters drift around in lazy circles as a message crawls along the electronic banner on the bank across the street: “Palin calls Obama a ‘socialist’!” the scrawl reads. It’s a delicious irony considering that one of the most unrepentant socialists in the country, Tony Kushner, is about to receive $200,000 worth of encouragement.

To some people, Kushner is the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with America. After all, he’s an over-educated, hyper-articulate, happily married Jewish homosexual Marxist who gets paid for writing plays—PLAYS!—that expose the hypocrisies and indecencies of the powerful and rich. He might as well have horns and carry a pitchfork. One of his early plays, A Bright Room Called Day —which the University of Minnesota theater department will stage during the Guthrie’s Kushner event—sparked controversy for drawing rather blunt parallels between Adolf Hitler and Ronald Reagan.

But at the Steinberg ceremony on this late October evening, the crowd is decidedly pro-Kushner, and most of the attendees seem to have some connection to Angels in America . One of them is Oskar Eustis, artistic director of New York’s Public Theater, who helped develop Angels in America and is one of Kushner’s best and oldest friends.

Eustis, who grew up in Minnesota and whose family still lives in Red Wing, is one of the most distinctive characters in American theater, a large man with a leonine mane of hair that practically shouts, “I am a director!” For the ceremony, Eustis has been asked to say a few words about his friend. As he takes the stage, the Steinberg Award itself—a cleverly designed cone of crystal that looks like a theater spotlight—sits on a table to his right. After a few cursory remarks, Eustis’ rich, theatrical baritone begins rising to the occasion.

“Tony has made an absolute and conscious choice to use the platform granted him by the success of his artistic work, and by his celebrity, to try to influence the dialogue of America about not only artistic issues, but about the broader political issues of our culture,” Eustis says. “The decision to use his power for that purpose is a decision that is provocative. He has made enemies, and we don’t always agree with him. But what we love about him is that he sets the standard for how important it’s possible for the theater to be, and how big a grasp artists should have, and how large a scope in the culture.

“ Angels in America is almost a generation old, but it speaks to young people as if it were written today,” Eustis continues. “I teach undergraduates [at New York University], and it’s amazing to watch the liberating power of Tony’s dramatic imagination work on them. The themes that he encompasses in his work, particularly the great theme of change—how difficult it is to change, how incredibly painful it is to change, and how necessary it is to change—is a theme that reverberates in the theater, because theater is the art form of change.”

Change is a theme that came up the night before as well, while Kushner and I dined at Beppe. I asked him why, since he believes so passionately in political activism and the power of art to spur social change, he chooses to write plays in a culture that largely ignores them. He responded: “When Munich came out, it was thrilling to think that on the day it opened more people probably saw it than have seen all of my theater work put together. But theater can be wonderful in a way no film can be because something else is going on, something that has to do with the collaboration between the actor, the text, and the audience. It’s a different form, and it can be staggeringly powerful.

“Theater may not reach huge numbers of people,” he continued, his passion pouring out in a rush of words, “but it’s the one place where trickle-down actually applies. You can make something happen in the world with a play because the people who see theater are some of the most intellectually curious, sophisticated, progressive people in the country. When these people come see a play and it gets them thinking, it changes them, which in turn changes the way they behave, which changes the way they engage with politics and the rest of the world. It’s hard to say how much of an effect you have, but I think one can have an important effect.”

Many artists shun the media, preferring to let their work speak for itself. Tony Kushner is not one of them. He shares his opinion—whether in essays, op-ed pieces, book introductions, press interviews, or various functions at which he is asked to speak—with an energetic, almost impish glee. He clearly loves to perform, and he has an endearing, boyish charm that is infectious. When he speaks, words spill out of his mouth at an astonishing rate, and when he’s hurling along at full throttle it’s as if his tongue is racing to keep up with his mind, which is blazing along at a level of consciousness that makes you feel smarter just for listening. The man is a free-association machine who peppers his monologues with effortless references to everything from Goethe, Bertolt Brecht, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx to Ingmar Bergman, The Sopranos , and Homer Simpson. The more he talks the smarter he gets, and he doesn’t stop until he feels he’s sufficiently exhausted any given topic.

Logorrhea (literally, diarrhea of knowledge) is the medical term for people whose verbosity is so conspicuously fluid, but that word is usually used disparagingly to describe someone who is slightly nuts and whose prolixity masks a lack of substance. Kushner, on the other hand, is spectacularly sane, and the word torrents that cascade so spontaneously out of his mouth are often beautifully structured verbal explorations similar to the rants for which many of his characters are famous. The first hour of his play Homebody/Kabul , for instance, is a long, rambling monologue on the history of Afghanistan (and many other things) that must strike terror into the heart of any actor who takes it on. And yet the consensus is that it’s one of the most brilliant monologues in American theater history.

“One of the things I love most about Tony’s work is his wonderfully luxurious, exuberant language,” says Berkeley Repertory Theatre artistic director Tony Taccone, who originally commissioned Angels in America and co-directed its world premiere at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. “He creates these wildly different, unique, and fantastical worlds that spring from these gorgeous words. It’s truly marvelous.”

Taccone will be directing “tiny Kushner,” the program of short plays appearing at the Guthrie, and says the key to understanding and appreciating Kushner’s genius is recognizing his love for ambivalence, paradox, metaphor, and humor. Kushner doesn’t just create characters who are conflicted; he sets them in contexts that give their thoughts and actions an almost cosmically grand significance.

“Tony believes that the world by its very nature is in primordial and absolute flux,” says Taccone. “Change is constant, and he wants to identify the ebb and flow of those changes—and not just personal change, but social and historical change as well. He’s essentially a political writer, so he’s not just interested in relationships, but also in how those relationships are reflected and refracted in the world at large. That he’s able to articulate all of those issues at once is impressive, but Tony’s work is also very funny. These aren’t rambling diatribes that don’t make any sense—Tony’s plays are an intense, high-level form of entertainment.”

When The New York Times ’ Frank Rich reviewed Taccone’s seven-hour production of Angels in America in 1992, he wrote: “The show is not merely mind-bending; at times it is mind-exploding, eventually piling on more dense imagery and baroque spiritual, political and historical metaphor than even an entranced, receptive audience can absorb in two consecutive sittings.”

Rich’s raves for the London and Broadway productions of Angels were among the first ripples in a tsunami of critical acclaim that ended up putting a Pulitzer on Kushner’s bookshelf. Looking back, says Rich, “There’s no question that in the past 15 years or so, Tony has been one of the most consistently inventive, exciting, and controversial writers in the American theater. He is constantly bursting the conventions of natural American drama, which is still a fairly dominant form. From Angels in America on, he’s been stretching American theater, exploring not only politics in a very sophisticated way, but issues of spirituality, myth, and social history. He can be quite poetic, and he’s capable of identifying, empathizing with, and creating characters as diverse as Roy Cohn, a black maid in the South, and a troubled Mormon from Utah. At the same time, he is interested in the larger forces of the world—economic, political, and sometimes sexual.”

At the Guthrie, Kushner’s gift for distilling the flow of history into shining moments of dramatic clarity will be particularly evident in Caroline, or Change , the semiautobiographical musical Kushner wrote with Jeanine Tesori. The play is set in 1963 and revolves around the relationship between a black maid, Caroline Thibodeaux, a young Jewish boy named Noah, and his family, the Gellmans. The deceptively simple conflict in the play has to do with the coins left in the young boy’s pockets when Caroline is doing the laundry. In order to teach the boy a lesson about money, Noah’s stepmother tells Caroline she is free to keep the change (“It’ll be like a raise!”), which is a boon for her until the day she finds an uncomfortably large amount of money in Noah’s pocket and must decide what to do with it.

Mind you, Caroline, or Change is a Tony Kushner musical, so the washing machine talks, the radio sings, the moon dispenses advice, and even the city bus has important things to say. The genius in Caroline’s dilemma is that it serves as a prism for viewing conflicts about race, class, and money in the South: the impact of the civil rights movement, the importance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s march on Birmingham and “I Have a Dream” speech, differing perspectives of JFK’s assassination and legacy, and various other issues of social justice.

The Times ’ Frank Rich says Caroline, or Change “is a remarkable work that takes something we think we know so well—the history of the civil rights struggle in America—and makes it seem immediate and personal. It’s extraordinary.” The music—a heady mix of Motown, blues, hymns, spirituals, folk music, klezmer, pop, and classical—reflects that time in American history as well, evoking the artistic ferment of the 1960s. Seen in the context of Barack Obama’s recent election, the cultural echo on the Guthrie’s Wurtele Thrust Stage is likely to be especially loud.

Though his plays are packed with enough ideas and imagery to keep graduate students busy for decades, Kushner seems uncomfortable when too much intellectual freight is heaped onto his plays. “My first job is to entertain,” Kushner insists. “I want people to laugh, to enjoy themselves. I hate ‘message’ plays. If I wanted to send messages, I’d write fortune cookies. I don’t think it’s my responsibility to educate people, either—and I certainly don’t want to be seen as a writer who hides the [intellectual] medicine in a gumdrop and tricks people into eating it.”

Chewing on Kushner’s ideas before swallowing them is more along the lines of what the Guthrie has in mind for Twin Citians with its Kushner Celebration. “The big, bold move for the Guthrie is not just to celebrate the work of one of America’s greatest living playwrights,” says Steven Rosenstone, a Guthrie board member and vice president for scholarly and cultural affairs at the University of Minnesota. “It’s getting deeper into it, to think about a set of plays and the issues they raise in a much more focused, disciplined way—to really take seriously the issues he’s confronting us with in his work, whether it’s about race, class, AIDS, sexual identity, gender politics, foreign policy, economics, spirituality, or history. . . . There’s a lot to talk about.”

But that shouldn’t stop people who just want to have a good time at the theater, insists the Public Theater’s Oskar Eustis: “The biggest misconception people have about Tony’s work is that it’s inaccessible, or too smart. I think people in Minneapolis will be amazed at how accessible he is. He is the funniest writer we have. His writing is so full of heart, and his empathy for human beings radiates off the stage—it’s why audiences all over the world respond so positively to his work.”

The Guthrie’s Kushner event runs April 18 through June 28. Let the celebration (and conversation) begin.

 

Clairvoyance or Coincidence? It is said that artists are society’s antennae and that part of their job is to detect the winds of change before the rest of us do. If so, Tony Kushner has earned a reputation for having the most finely tuned cultural feelers in the country. He seems to have had an eerie intuition about the tragic tide of American history in the late 20th and early 21st century. Angels in America helped legitimize gay America in the 1990s. Homebody/Kabul, half of which is set in Afghanistan, was famously heading into rehearsals as the World Trade Center towers were hit on 9/11. And the opening scene of his musical, Caroline, or Change, which premiered at New York’s Public Theater in 2003, two years before Hurricane Katrina hit, features a maid in Lake Charles, Louisiana, singing: Nothing ever happens underground in Louisiana cause they ain’t no underground There is only underwater Kushner dismisses the notion that he is gifted with a prophetic imagination. He says that, if anything, he usually feels behind the curve of history: “Look, I started writing Angels in America halfway through the Reagan administration, when people all over the country were dying of AIDS. And by the time I completed it in 1992, Clinton had already been elected, so I had concerns that it would feel dated. But it holds up pretty well. . . . As for Caroline, or Change, I grew up in Louisiana. You can stick a spoon in the ground and get water there; it’s all anyone ever talks about.” Even so, the disconcerting pulse of prophecy in his previous plays has heightened interest in Kushner’s new play, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism with a Key to the Scriptures. With California’s recent passage of Proposition 8 denying gays the right to marry, and the discussion over capitalism’s demise gaining momentum around the globe, the idea that Kushner may once again have his prescient fingers on the pulse of the zeitgeist doesn’t feel entirely misguided. Certainly, Minnesotans may feel a whiff of déjà vu when The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide opens, because Kushner gave a talk at the University of Minnesota 11 years ago with the exact same title—which, as it turns out, is a riff on the title of a book for housewives written by George Bernard Shaw called The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. One line in Kushner’s U of M talk was: “Oh God of the free market, whose bible is The Wall Street Journal and whose dwelling place is the University of Chicago, hear our complaint!” Clairvoyance or coincidence? You decide.