Tony Kushner’s Day

"What?" I said.

"Speed."

Working backward, I figured out that the question I'd half-heard was "I'm wondering if I should take an amphetamine."

"My doctor prescribed them three years ago and I've been carrying them around, but I've never taken one," he said. "I guess I probably shouldn't."

I told him this was where my professional interest as a journalist and my fondness for him personally collided, because if he took speed and started freaking out, I would definitely be writing about it. He laughed, and by then it was time to start the discussion—without chemicals.

After spending an hour talking to the actors about their dual responsibilities as artists and citizens, he crossed the hall to address students taking a course called Tony Kushner in America. Most of the questions he drew were friendly—adoring, even. But a young woman wearing a silver cross necklace told him she thought his plays demonized evangelicals—that is, people like her.

Kushner's response was a 10-minute symphony in the key of Everything That Is Wrong With Evangelicals. He didn't raise his voice, but with a level passion he proceeded to deny that he demonizes anybody, since he doesn't believe in demons; note the folly of a "literal" reading of the Bible, a text that must be interpreted to make any sense; explain why he was "very, very angry" about the way that evangelicals were depriving him of his civil rights by opposing gay marriage; accuse them of damaging America by trying to turn our pluralist secular democracy into a theocracy; and de-ride them for falsely claiming victim status despite their vast wealth and power.

"You seem like a lovely person," he told the young woman, now blushing bright red. "I hope I didn't suddenly turn into this"—and in lieu of a noun, he made an exaggerated snarling face and claws, drawing a laugh.

Anger seems to be, for Kushner, a kind of natural resource—a fuel that propels the machine. That's not unusual for lefty playwrights in New York. What is remarkable—and what the Guthrie festival reinforces—is that his instincts as a dramatist trump even his ferocious partisan sympathies.

In Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy, one of the short works that make up Tiny Kushner, the Guthrie's evening of one-act plays, Laura Bush reads Dostoevsky to Iraqi children killed by American bombs. The opening seems like a perfect setup for character assassination. On two prior occasions when I've seen the play performed, the audiences in the early going have greeted it as such. But Kushner is only laying a trap for the people who share his politics. As the play unfolds, it grants the first lady an aching moral conscience. In a deft reversal, it even indicts the audience that's intent on judging her, arguing that we share the responsibility for what the government does. Laura Bush may have left the White House, but at the Guthrie the message remains clear: we should be as guilt-racked as she is.

In a sense, this just means that Kushner anticipated the all-together-now vibe of the new era and is occasionally willing to write nice things about a Republican—which says more about other writers' tribalism than his independence. The really extraordinary quality of his political writing, though, runs deeper than partisanship. Seeing so many of his plays in quick succession, from Bright Room to the new one, makes the dynamic easier to spot.