Tony Kushner’s Day

"I wish I was an octopus," says Roy Cohn in Angels in America, " a f--king octopus." These days Tony Kushner, the man who wrote that line, is a f--king octopus. With life more chaotic than usual—good news and bad news coming at us faster and from more directions than we can handle—what part of it escapes his tentacles? (Story continued below...)

Consider: Kushner was a socialist long before the financial collapse led this magazine to declare that we are all socialists now. The administration has renewed its efforts to address the Middle East crisis, a subject that Kushner has been writing, speaking and generally making himself obnoxious about for years. He is a leading advocate for gay marriage at a time when the issue zooms toward public acceptance (he and his husband, the journalist Mark Harris, share the distinction of being the first same-sex couple to be featured in the Vows column in The New York Times). And just as a bookish lawyer from Illinois settles into the White House, he's writing a Major Motion Picture about Abraham Lincoln that Steven Spielberg will direct. Of the many strange things about American life, one of the strangest is that a 52-year-old gay Jewish Southern playwright finds himself—economically, politically, socially, culturally—so near the heart of the action.

Corporeally, however, Tony Kushner finds himself in Minnesota. Or did, anyway, on a recent Saturday afternoon, when he waved sheepishly and offered a wan smile and looked entirely uncomfortable about the attention he was receiving. To be fair, it was a lot of attention. He had come to the Twin Cities because the Guthrie Theater, one of the nation's leading regional theaters, was kicking off an unprecedented and wholly immersive two-month celebration of his work. All three of the Guthrie's stages would host performances of his plays, as well as lectures, talkbacks and screenings.

But at the kickoff ceremony, the focus wasn't on the writing, it was on the writer. On a platform in the theater's towering lobby, the mayor handed him a proclamation declaring it Tony Kushner Day in Minneapolis. Kushner was clearly honored, but his instinct is to self-deprecate. "I have, I guess, another 11 hours left of Tony Kushner Day," he told the rapt crowd of 100 or so. "Then I'll go back to wishing I was David Mamet."

I had come to Minnesota because I wanted to see what a life of brilliant art and progressive advocacy looked like in the age of Obama, and could think of no finer specimen than Kushner. I had expected—what with the Guthrie lavishing on him the kind of adulation that Fellini would consider over the top and the dawning of a new progressive age for America and all—to find him riding pretty high. But Kushner wasn't in excelsis: he was in extremis.

After the speech, I asked him how he felt about all the praise. "If only they knew," he said quietly. He declined to specify what, exactly, "they" didn't know. But the fact that I was escorting him through the labyrinthine halls of the Guthrie to the small, windowless office where he was going to spend the rest of Tony Kushner Day frantically trying to finish the new play on which the festival depended—the one set to open in just two and a half weeks—contributes to an answer.

Beyond staging revivals of his plays, the Guthrie had commissioned a new work from Kushner: The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism, With a Key to the Scriptures—a title he adapted from a book by George Bernard Shaw that he found in his late grandmother's library. Though the festival had been announced more than a year earlier, his difficulties in finishing the Lincoln screenplay gave him a perilously late start on his new play. And because there were already 11 actors in a rehearsal room downstairs waiting for their lines, and buses zigzagging around town advertising the play, the show had to go on.

Kushner would call finishing this script amid all his other commitments the most demanding stretch of his professional life. It also turned out to be one of the most revealing. While he sat sequestered in his office (bare cubicle desks, cold overhead light, a fallout shelter's charm), the revivals of his plays elsewhere in the building revealed how work as politically engaged as Kushner's changes when our politics change. On his occasional breaks, his conversations revealed how a leading progressive reacts to Barack Obama's presidency. And the whole ordeal revealed how it feels for an artist to be plugged so completely into the 21st-century zeitgeist. For one thing, it is really, really tiring.

If you know of Kushner, chances are it's because of Angels in America, his two-part, seven-hour epic about gays, Mormons, AIDS, Roy Cohn and the national identity that exploded onto Broadway in 1993 and later became an HBO film directed by Mike Nichols. As Prior Walter grapples with a prophecy from heaven (delivered by an angel that crashes through his ceiling), the Mormon Republican lawyer Joe Pitt wrestles with his homosexuality and a half-dozen other vivid characters collide in moving and fantastical ways, Kushner delivers exactly what his subtitle (another riff on Shaw) proclaims his play to be: "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes."

Since then, Kushner's intuitions about society have added a new quality to the lyricism, humor and emotional power of Angels, one that the Guthrie festival makes clear: a freaky clairvoyance. A decade ago, Kushner wrote a play about a dowdy British woman who disappears into an obscure Central Asian nation, and the husband and daughter who go looking for her. By the time Homebody/Kabul opened in December 2001, the United States had invaded Afghanistan.