Canonizing Kushner

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.”

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.