Absolute Ambivalence, or
The Magpie's Revenge
By Jonathan Kalb
The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide
to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures
By Tony Kushner
The Public Theater
425 Lafayette St.
Box office: 212-967-7555
Tony Kushner has described himself as an inveterate
magpie, a tireless accumulator and amalgamator of diverse influences.
His earliest works were sincere attempts to channel Brecht and Caryl
Churchill, but he also watched a lot of crap TV and Hollywood trash
as a youngster, read comics, the Bible, histories of religion and all
the canonical American family dramas, and formed a deep attachment to
Ludlam's Ridiculous aesthetic. Famously, he went on to weave those unlikely
threads together into the fabulous epic cloth called Angels in America.
Theatrically speaking, his new play is shockingly
straightforward by comparison, despite its playfully sesquipedalian
title--The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism
with a Key to the Scriptures. This work isn't really "epic" or
"fabulous" in any established sense. It's basically a realistic family
drama in the time-tried mold of O'Neill and Miller, about a retired
longshoreman and lifelong communist forced to explain to his loving
but self-involved and otherwise screwed-up children why he wants to
kill himself.
Many of its themes and topics echo those in Angels:
betrayal and abandonment within gay marriage, scriptural guidance sought
for decidedly modern and material problems, gay camp used as a general
social lubricant, classical quotation used as a means of jump-cutting
from the specific to the general. The difference is that The Intelligent
Homosexual juggles all of this with far less theatrical variety
and inventiveness. Nearly four hours long, it is often shaggy and rhetorical,
woolly and diffuse, and now and then it strains to compensate (or apologize)
for its formal conventionality--several extended and tedious sequences
when the actors all speak at once, for instance. Despite this, the play
is also incisive, passionate, courageous, absorbing, and uniquely ambitious--exactly
the sort of smart, messily risky, broadly inquisitive project that our
theater needs to see far more often if it's ever to snap out of its
current doldrums.
The Intelligent Homosexual has the feel
of a political sequel to Angels in America, because its underlying
subject is the debilitating disappearance of utopian ideals in the Western
world. Angels ended (in a scene set in 1990) on a vaguely hopeful
note, looking toward a future of collapsed "beautiful systems" and "old
fixed orders" heralded by the end of the Soviet Union. The Intelligent
Homosexual picks up in 2007 amid the stalemate that emerged from
that upheaval, when consumerism is triumphant, the political left has
been backed into the defensive, ameliorative posture we know all too
well, and intelligent people no longer ponder systematic alternatives
to gloves-off capitalism. Gus, the aging communist--played with searing
precision and palpable rage by Michael Cristofer--shocks no one in announcing
that he would rather not live in such a world.
This man spouts Marxist theory and union slogans
on the slightest provocation, but he is also haunted by his betrayal
of his principles years ago. What's more, his activist, working-class
forefathers also betrayed those principles under pressure, in troubling
ways that materially benefited Gus, so he is aware that his bravura
pose of moral superiority is manifesto-thin. That knowledge increases
his self-loathing. Kushner has been extremely clever in aligning the
details of his complicated family drama with this overarching political
conundrum. Each of Gus's three children is caught up in a different
personal crisis that sheds fresh light on some facet of the larger debate
about communal identity and responsibility.
Yet what makes the play truly compelling and
heartbreaking is the way it probes the characters' psychological crises.
None is all that remarkable in itself--one son spends $30,000 of his
sister's money on a hustler, for instance, another secretly impregnates
that sister's lesbian lover--but Kushner ruthlessly squeezes the roots
of these stories as no other living playwright would, pressing each
to such a pitch of emotional revelation (with much help from
his splendid 11-member cast, directed by Michael Greif) that the result
is vivid theatricality drawn improbably from moral imaginativeness.
There are times, it must be said, when The
Intelligent Homosexual feels more like a dramatized essay than
a play. I suspect that is because Kushner used it in part to respond
to some of his critics. I have no hard evidence for this but the soft
evidence in the text is pretty convincing. Over the years, its rave
reviews and canonical stature notwithstanding, Angels in America
has been attacked rather severely by leftist scholars who object to
its political ambivalence. They have damned it for proposing no explicit
alternative political system, for subordinating its "epic" action to
personal stories, and for using revolution as a mere figure of speech.
In focusing this new, lengthy work on the thoughts of a character driven
to despair by precisely the ambivalence of which he was accused, Kushner
essentially batted the ball back into the court of those tenured radicals.
And his stroke was clean, firm and powerful, since Gus, just the sort
of absolutist who would denounce Kushner as a weak-kneed gradualist,
cannot survive in the real world.