Tony Kushner’s Day

However different their circumstances, Kushner's characters are (I like to imagine) standing on a beach, looking out at the sea, feeling the tide pull against the backs of their legs and the sand disappear under their feet. Before long, a wall of water—history—is bearing down on them. Self-regarding, stubborn, weak-willed, if well-meaning, they are swept away by their times. People appear in his plays not as some on the left and right want them to be—noble, heroic, pure—but richly, humanly imperfect. Even the Angel in Angels is a screw-up. "This age wanted heroes," says an artist in Bright Room, speaking for Caroline, the Homebody's daughter, Louis in Angels and, frankly, all but a very few of the rest of us. "It got us instead. A whole generation of washouts."

Kushner isn't shy about where this comes from. "Some of the best stuff I've [written] is about people with real problems," he said. "They're really unhappy, f--ked-up, tortured people. I didn't make all that stuff up. I am that. I'm a very complicated—as everyone is—complicated person with a lot of contradictions." It's no wonder he called writing his Lincoln screenplay "the hardest thing I've ever done"—harder even than Angels. Is any human being less like a Tony Kushner character—drowning in history, conquered by desires and phobias, unequal to the demands of the times—than Abraham Lincoln?

Three weeks later, Kushner looked depleted but used to it, like a public defender, or a mother of twins. When the new play's scenes were slow in coming—and were, even by Kushner's standards, fantastically difficult and dense—the Guthrie was forced to postpone the opening. Even with an extra week, he cut it close. The play's scenes had never been staged—or read, for that matter—in the right order until two days before the first official performance. A new scene was added less than three hours before the curtain went up. Director Michael Greif and his brave actors worked some kind of magic to get it over.

The Intelligent Homosexual's etc. tells the story of Gus Marcantonio, a retired Brooklyn longshoreman and communist who decides, in the summer of 2007, that he wants to die. His three grown children and his sister have come home to talk about it. Over more than three hours of stage time (with two intermissions), we watch family members argue with their spouses, lovers and siblings about Gus and each other but also (this being a Tony Kushner play) about Marxism, Christian Science, labor history and real estate.

The critics who attended press night have knocked the play for feeling unfinished. Well, yes. Even when Kushner has a smooth path to a world premiere, he goes on rewriting his plays for years. Yet some essential qualities are already plain.

This is, for one thing, the darkest play he has written, lacking anything like the warm benediction that closed Angels or the upbeat epilogue of Caroline. It also isn't a play that people will find prescient in a year or two: Kushner wants to lead the public conversation rightnow. He's written a moral response to the financial crisis, spurring the deep soul-searching that's only just getting underway in society. He's written, in effect, a family drama about the morality of money. It expresses a Marxist-tinged horror at the way our relationships are commodified in a consumer society: One of the sons talks about how money warps his relationship with a gay hustler. Gus contemplates suicide in part because it will leave his children a valuable piece of real estate.

But Kushner isn't a pamphleteer: he doesn't claim that Marx or anybody else has the answers. In fact, he is the leading playwright of the 21st century for the precise reason that nobody does a better job capturing the sensation that there are no answers anymore: that modern life means feeling your way instead of relying on one big theory, trying to keep a handle on an overbooked, hyperconnected, overwhelming world.

Only after seeing the play in front of an audience, Kushner said, did he realize why all its disparate concerns—politics, intelligence, homosexuality, family and the rest—ended up knocking around in this story. He was talking about the rewrites that still awaited him but could have been describing the task of the new president he admires so much or the challenge that faces the rest of us in our busy, fragmenting time: "Now I have to pull it all together."

Editor's note: After this story went to press, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported that Kushner's new play would open on Broadway in spring 2010, produced by Scott Rudin. (When contacted by NEWSWEEK, a spokesperson for the show would not confirm details of future productions.) The producers asked the national critics not to review the play in Minneapolis— even though several had previously made plans to do so—citing a tradition of New-York-bound productions not being reviewed by New York critics. Also Kushner wanted more time to work on it.

© 2009