Tony Kushner’s Day

Next he wrote a musical based on his experiences growing up in a Jewish household with an African-American maid in Louisiana. A year after Caroline, or Change opened on Broadway, Hurricane Katrina inundated New Orleans, and suddenly the lines that a poor black woman sings to open the show, "There ain't no underground in Louisiana, there is only underwater," took on an eerie prescience. In fact, Kushner began hearing that phrase so often that his husband suggested "Eara Lee Prescient" should be his drag name.

At the Guthrie, Caroline now seems so prescient it's unnerving—so prescient it's absurd. If Kushner and the composer Jeanine Tesori tried to write a musical in which everybody is constantly singing about change a few months after an African-American rode the theme of change to the White House, they'd be called shameless opportunists. But this is a revival. Kushner really did write a play that evokes the spirit of Barack Obama's election four years before he announced his candidacy. He really did have Noah, the character based on his boyhood self, call Caroline (apropos of nothing) "the president of the United States." He somehow wrote an epilogue so keyed into its moment that what once felt bitter, even tragic—Caroline's daughter describing how her mother's sacrifices inspired her to fight for civil rights—now seems practically triumphant.

"What is it with you?" I asked him.

The day after Tony Kushner Day, he had emerged from his writing cave for a late dinner at one of the Guthrie's restaurants. He didn't come up with a good explanation for his psychic streak, but he did allow that the show's new resonance seemed "pretty cool" to him: "I would have assumed at some point, if the play lasted, there'd be an audience watching where there's an African-American president. But I didn't think it'd be in 2008."

Kushner has sharp features, dark-framed glasses and an affect that is at once academic and passionately engaged—making it as easy to imagine him strolling the quad with the rest of the adjunct profs as shouting imprecations in the faces of the other literati in some bygone European café. Particularly when the subject is politics, he talks very fast, conveying thoughts that have a tendency to divide, form squadrons, explore trails and reunite a sentence or two later. This happened when our conversation about Caroline became a conversation about Obama—specifically, Kushner's delight at his presidency so far. I wanted to know how he could reconcile his belief that Obama might be "a genuinely great president" with the fact that Obama isn't in favor of one of the causes dearest to Kushner: gay marriage.

"Pbbbht! Of course he's in favor of gay marriage!" Kushner said. "He's absolutely in favor. Does anybody actually believe that Barack Obama and Michelle Obama think that we shouldn't have—that this man who is a constitutional-law scholar—is it a complicated issue? Obama is capable of parsing infinitely more complicated questions than this. Read the Iowa Supreme Court decision—it's magnificently crystal clear. There's no issue here. It's over. It's done. Could the first black man or white man or Jesus Christ himself get elected in 2008 saying he believes in gay marriage? Of course not."

When Kushner talks about gay marriage, he uses a language of civil rights that evokes the era of Caroline: marriage, he said, would mean nothing less than "finally becoming complete citizens of this country." Kushner has worked to bring that about, through both his writing and his marching to protest California's Prop 8 in Manhattan earlier this year. He is also, in a sense, a living marker of how the issue moves fitfully but inexorably toward its resolution.

When Kushner and Harris met 11 years ago, "gay marriage wasn't even much of a phrase, let alone an issue," Harris told me. Their 2003 commitment ceremony made a splash in the Times. But last summer, when they had their legal marriage, nobody noticed. They didn't invite guests to join them at city hall in Provincetown; they didn't even write vows. "The meaningful part of it was walking into a government institution and having them be perfectly cool about giving us paperwork to fill out, just like any couple, and doing it," said Harris. "We said, 'Let's just go to city hall and get married and go to the beach'."

In Minneapolis, Kushner looked as if he could use some R&R. He'd never scheduled a production of a new play without a script before, and now opening night was approaching without even a glimmer of a finished third act. "I'm in a very peculiar cycle right now," he said. "I'm working all day long, every day. I didn't sleep last night at all." At all? "Two and a half hours. That's on top of the day before. It's been at least a week since I've had seven hours of sleep. I have to do that tonight." But he didn't.

Kushner admits to having "a certain degree of unhinged grandiosity that makes it hard for me to say I can't do six things," which is why, even into the fraught final stages of his writing process, he went on doing six things. He hosted a public conversation about a Caryl Churchill play that had been called anti-Semitic (Kushner defended her) and helped to organize a reading of his Lincoln screenplay, which he claims went very well, though its chances of getting filmed remain unclear (big budget, bad economy). The day after our Caroline conversation, he stopped writing to go talk to two groups of students at the University of Minnesota.

First up was the cast of an undergraduate production of A Bright Room Called Day, Kushner's first play, which used the story of young artists in Berlin reacting to Hitler's rise as a metaphor for Reaganism. Though Kushner looked happy to see the students and they beamed at him, his ordeal was breaking him down. As the actors set up the classroom all around us, he said something that I didn't quite catch, but that sounded as if he was asking me if he should "get a mean."