Kushner's "Intelligent Homosexual's Guide' in NY

Remember when you first saw Angels in America and you could hardly wait to get back from intermission to find out what happened to those interesting people? Well, Tony Kushner has done it again with his new play: a rich, nourishing stew called The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures.

And if you think the title's long, wait until you see the play, which clocks in at just less than four hours. Which is to say that the third act is probably too long and too repetitious. But with a playwright this interesting, why complain?

Other family drama pales by comparison— except maybe The Cherry Orchard, a comparison Kushner both makes and self-mocks. His New York clan— consisting of an aging father, his sister and his three middle-aged children and all their partners— gathers in their Brooklyn brownstone to discuss the sale of the house (is there a subject New Yorkers are more avid about than real estate?) And discuss is too pale a word: The play's first moments put us on notice that this work has more in common with Shavian dialectic (Major Barbara, to be specific— more allusion, more self-mockery) than it does with the usual dialogic whining we're accustomed to listening to onstage.

Death and sex

The comparison with Shaw is really just a way of saying that Kushner offers ideas here— serious, intensely held positions on the political theories and socioeconomics that shaped the 20th Century: capitalism, socialism and communism, with their corollaries, unions and private property. Kushner's characters are smart, articulate people shouting, betraying, forgiving and loving each other.

The planned sale of the house is a consequence of the father's plan to kill himself. We learn that he attempted suicide a year earlier, and thus Kushner raises another of his great themes: death. And, as we learn about the lives of the grown children, add sex— in multiple and surprising combinations, any one of which would be the big revelation in a lesser work.

Then there's religion. The scriptures of the title are both Biblical (a family full of failed theologians) and Marxist (a family full of failed communists). All struggle with "goddamned despair."

Real-life shouting

Kushner can write dialogue so well that he's willing to waste it: Arguments happen among the Marcantonios as they actually do in life, with people talking simultaneously, shouting each other down. It's impossible to understand it all, but that becomes the point: This is realism with a vengeance, directed with dazzling and surgical precision by Michael Greif.

And what superb actors he has to direct! Michael Christofer is the patriarch Gus, an old-school longshoreman turned labor organizer; Stephen Spinella plays Gus's homosexual son Pill (short for PierLuigi), a history teacher unable to finish his dissertation. Pill is married to Paul (K. Todd Freeman), an African-American theology professor who has put up with Pill's philanderings for years, most recently with Eli (Michael Esper), a young prostitute who is also a Yale graduate— in this play, even the hookers are smart.

Gus's sister Clio (a deadpanning Brenda Wehle) was first a nun, then joined the Peruvian terrorist group, Shining Path and has been on death watch for her brother during the past year.

The lone heterosexual

Linda Emond, called Empty (nickname for Maria Teresa), is Pill's sister, formerly a nurse, now a labor lawyer, still fighting the good fight, although not radically enough to satisfy Gus. Her very pregnant partner, Maeve, has just finished her doctorate in theology; the baby was fathered by Vito (Steven Pasquale), the youngest of Gus's three children, the only one who isn't intellectual, doesn't speak Italian and is heterosexual; he's married to Sooze, a Korean-American (Hettienne Park).

The odd man out is Adam (Matt Servitto), Empty's ex-husband, a real-estate lawyer who still lives in the basement. Shelle (Molly Price) is Gus's advisor from some local Hemlock Society, since Gus's last suicide attempt made such a mess of the bathroom ("seriously fucked up the grout").

The shifting set (designed by Mark Wendland) gives us both the solidity of the old-fashioned house and the fluidity of different points of view. The family-ness of the wooden dining room table, the piles of books, the photos, the worn carpet is reflected in the family-ness of shared sibling moments, as when Pill and Empty, both exasperated by their father's diatribe, clutch at their heads, pretending to tear their hair— obviously an old routine.

Like ancient Greece

In a play about the value of labor— "the work of your hands"— these actors do a yeoman's job. As has Kushner, at his most vivid, most generous, most passionate

Gus has learned Latin in order to translate Horace to give us this:

We hear of an upstanding citizen of Argos
Whose mind was taken over by a strange idea:
That, all his life, he was sitting by himself in a theater,
clapping or moved, watching and listening appreciatively,
as a wonderful company of tragedians
played their play for him, alone.

Tony Kushner has made everyone in his audience upstanding citizens of Argos, dreaming his intelligent dream, all of us alone together, applauding his wonderful company of tragedians.♦


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