Long Pauses

Tag: Author: Kushner

  • So Awfully, Irreducibly Real

    JOE: Why are you sitting in the dark? Turn on the light.

    HARPER: No. I heard the sounds in the bedroom again. I know someone was in there.

    JOE: No one was.

    HARPER: Maybe actually in the bed, under the covers with a knife.
    Oh, boy. Joe. I, um, I’m thinking of going away. By which I mean: I think I’m going off again. You . . . you know what I mean?

    JOE: Please don’t. Stay. We can fix it. I pray for that. This is my fault, but I can correct it. You have to try too . . .

    (He turns on the light. She turns it off again.)

    HARPER: When you pray, what do you pray for?

    JOE: I pray for God to crush me, break me up into little pieces and start all over again.

    HARPER: Oh. Please. Don’t pray that.

    JOE: I had a book of Bible stories when I was a kid. There was a picture I’d look at twenty times every day: Jacob wrestles with the angel. I don’t really remember the story, or why the wrestling — just the picture. Jacob is young and very strong. The angel is . . . a beautiful man, with golden hair and wings, of course. I still dream about it. Many nights. I’m . . . It’s me. In that struggle. Fierce, and unfair. The angel is not human, and it holds nothing back, so how could anyone human win, what kind of a fight is that? It’s not just. Losing means your soul thrown down in the dust, your heart torn out from God’s. But you can’t not lose.

    HARPER: In the whole entire world, you are the only person, the only person I love or have ever loved. And I love you terribly. Terribly. That’s what’s so awfully, irreducibly real. I can make up anything but I can’t dream that away.

    — Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, Act 2, Scene 2

    Tony Kushner is taken to task from time to time for his harsh treatment of Joe Pitts, the closeted, Republican, Mormon lawyer whose self-hatred motivates so much of the plays’ drama (and poisons his marriage to Harper). Those critics must ignore this passage, which is among the most beautiful and heartbreaking Kushner has written. It’s been at the very back of my mind for nearly a week now but came front and center earlier this evening.

  • Kushner on Miller

    From The Nation:

    He made it clear in his plays and his essays that his critical thinking and social consciousness had their genesis in the red politics that were pervasive when he was growing up, a politics catalyzed by the suffering he witnessed and experienced in the Great Depression, a politics shaped in response to the toxic, obnoxious valorization of greed always, always re-emerging in American history as a bedrock tenet of the political right. Although he refused the mechanical determinism of the unthinking Marxist left, he created in his greatest play a drama in which it is impossible to avoid thinking about economics–money–in any attempt to render coherent the human tragedy unfolding before you.

    Consider the Lomans: What has brought darkness down upon this family? Their flaws are part of their tragedy, but only a part–every flaw is magnified, distorted, made fatal by, well, alienation, by the market, where the pressure is inhuman and the human is expendable. Consider the moment when the Nothing of tragedy is enunciated, and annunciated, in Death of a Salesman, Biff and Willy’s final fight (“Pop, I’m nothing! I’m nothing, Pop! Can’t you understand that? There’s no spite in it anymore. I’m just what I am, that’s all. Will you let me go, for Christ’s sake?”). It’s tragic negation, vast and shatteringly intimate; everything is annihilated, and at the same time something new is being born. It’s “nothing” of the tragedies of Euripides and Shakespeare, and in Miller’s postwar, marketplace masterpiece, one hears an echo of another “nothing,” tragic but also political–namely, “You have nothing to lose but your chains.”

  • Huh?

    Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner will rewrite Steven Spielberg’s untitled drama about the aftermath of the 1972 Munich Olympics, where members of the Israeli team were held hostage and slain by Palestinian extremists.

    Kushner and Spielberg? Together? You do remember the final scene of Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, right? I love it. Given his history of progressive activism and his ambivalence toward the Zionest cause, I’m not the least bit surprised that Kushner would be attracted to a project that addresses head-on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; Spielberg’s involvement comes as a bit of a shock, however. Kushner’s script, I’m sure, will be sympathetic to the Palestinian cause (without, of course, condoning outright the kidnappings). Will Spielberg follow through? Will he explore the issue’s moral and political complexities? Will he risk his lionized, post-Schindler status?

    More news:
    The Advocate
    The Guardian

  • My Dissertation (in the News)

    “A World in Which Everything Hurts,” a profile of Arthur Miller in The Forward, gets bonus points for mentioning, in a single paragraph, three of the authors I’m writing about in my dissertation:

    In contrast, for example, to Tony Kushner, whose humanism seems to spring from a secular engagement with Jewish religion and history, Miller seems to come to his universalism only through the abandonment of the Jewish tradition. And in his rejectionism, he fails to display the depth or nuance of Philip Roth, whose own critique of Jewish life — however damning — reflects an intense, intimate confrontation with his subject.

    Another key figure from my project, Norman Mailer, shows up in The New York Metro, discussing the upcoming Republican Convention with his son, John Buffalo Mailer. Apparently I’m right on track in looking back to the fall of the New Left (and books like Mailer’s Armies of the Night) in trying to make sense of the contemporary Left’s problems:

    The march on the Pentagon even ended up having a final effect that was impressive. I think it was the beginning of the end of the war in Vietnam, and for a very simple reason: Lyndon Johnson saw 50,000 mostly middle-class people come to Washington to stage a set of demonstrations that were going to be opposed by troops and police. LBJ knew people well. From his point of view, most middle-class people were hardly full of physical bravery. If they were going to pay their own money and come by car or bus or train to march into the possibility of being hit over the head with a cop’s club, then there had to be millions of people behind them.

     

  • Amen, Brother!

    Since I started doing interviews, I’ve answered the “preaching to the converted” question more than any other. It seems to me predicated on an unthinking use of the terms “preaching” and “converted.” It’s not as if all preachers, including for instance John Donne, were merely dispensers of predigested, soundbite rhetoric and cliche; good preachers are gifted articulators of the thorniest, juiciest, most dangerous, most contradictory problems, dilemmas, controversies.

    It’s not as if the “converted” are always only Moonies lacking any sort of spiritual liveliness or freedom of thought. Quite the contrary. The converted, the congregation, united by certain beliefs, share amongst themselves bewilderment, despair, hope needing amplification, confusion needing examination and elucidation, and avenues of interesting and productive inquiry. Lockstep congregations are a sure sign of a moribund faith, of the absence of anything Divine. A good preacher rattles her congregants’ smugness and complacency, and congregants to do the same for the preacher. Good preachers are exhilarating to listen to, and the converted have a lot to think about. So this “preaching to the converted” question doesn’t address all religious practice, or all theater — just crummy religion and inept theater.

    From 10 Questions for Tony Kushner

  • Shit Happens

    Yesterday at 4:06 pm, I pulled onto the campus of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC — the end of my four hour, 265 mile drive. I know it was 4:06 because that was also the moment that the local NPR station announced that, because of weather-related travel difficulties, Tony Kushner had been forced to cancel his scheduled speech and book-signing. I did the only thing I could do. I drove over to my motel and cancelled my reservation, called my wife to tell her the news, then headed west on I-40. 265 miles later I was back home.

    I don’t get upset about things over which I have no control. I just don’t. It’s not in me. I am deeply disappointed, though — and for several reasons that I won’t go into here. The good news is that, during my nine hours in the car, I was able to listen to several evangelical preachers, evangelical money managers, and evangelical counselors on the radio. Things I learned:

    • Meditating on God’s splendor will sustain me in the hard times. Also, meditating on God’s splendor will sustain me in the trying times and in the darkest times. (It was a 3-point sermon.)
    • Once I have saved three months’ living expenses, I should glorfiy God by putting 10% of my monthly income into IRAs and high-yield bonds.
    • Even if it’s painful and boring, I should listen to my wife talk for 10 minutes every night. (Don’t worry, guys, once she realizes that it’s ten minutes every night, your wife won’t need to talk your ear off all in one excruciating sitting.)

  • And One More Thing

    For your reading pleasure: some snippets from Tony Kushner’s commentary on the Klezmatic’s recent CD, Possessed. Parts of the commentary, I noticed, have made their way into his and Alisa Solomon’s introduction to their new collection of essays, Wrestling with Zion, which I got for Christmas — given to me, no doubt, by some relative who couldn’t possibly imagine why I would be interested in a book of “Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” — and which now sits on my towering “to read” pile. This part isn’t in their introduction.

    Hebrew- and Yiddish-illiterate, I barely know how to pray; riddled with ambivalence, child of Marx, Freud, Mahler, Benjamin, Kafka, Goldman, Luxemburg, Trotsky, An-ski, Schoenberg, mongrel product of Judaism’s and of Jewish exteriority, of its ghetto-hungry curiosity, of its assimilationist genius, I now approach Judaism as Jews once approached the splendid strangeness of the Goyishe Velt: I am shall we say deeply confused, but not complacent. And this I think of course is profoundly Jewish. So perhaps I can write your liner notes after all. Of music, son of a clarinetist and a bassoonist though I be, I know nothing. . . .

    High Holy Days this year found me doing research for my new play in a tiny town in Britain with no other Jews and no shul, so I cast my bread upon English waters, said the prayers I remembered, lit candles, made Shofar noises, cried for the Dead, begged for forgiveness and decided to read the Bible.

    And then he even mentions my favorite line from Perestroika, a line that, as he admits, always gets cut.

    Why does the God in whom I may or may not believe, or rather in whose existence I simultaneously believe and doubt, why does the Almighty spend the first five books of the Bible writing such morally problematic, bewildering stories? We’ve always had the answer to that one. Because the Torah is not clarification but the World itself; it is the World’s Goad towards perplexity, interpretation, towards Midrash and Talmud. “Az er darf ringen mit zayn Libn Nomen!” as a character in Perestroika says, in a scene that’s always cut because let’s face it, the play’s too long. “You must struggle with the Almighty!” “Azoy tut a Yid!” “It’s the Jewish way!”

    I watched all six hours of Angels in America on Saturday night, and I’ve decided that that’s how it should be seen.

  • But Is It Funny?

    Dale Peck at Slate offers the best critical reading of HBO’s Angels that I’ve found. He points out something that has bothered me a bit as well: the film just isn’t very funny. Which is a shame, because the play is really funny. Unlike so many of the TV critics who have offered their half-informed opinions over the last few weeks, Peck also understands the theatrical traditions from which the plays emerged and against which they so forcefully reacted. This is just good stuff:

    Ultimately, though, the real problem is that Angels is and remains a play, not a movie. It is deliberately, powerfully anachronistic in its approach to narrative, updating–one wants to say outing–the mid-century work of Williams and Albee. Though Nichols labors doggedly at filling in the spaces even the most lavish theatrical productions leave blank, his sets come across as cluttered, unnuanced, unnecessary; his frequent angel-eye perspectives seem thrown in just, you know, because. In particular, the addition of New York City vistas, the panoramas and facades left out of the play’s backdrops, seem shuffled in from a mismatched deck. That’s because Angels, even more than most plays, is steeped in conversation, soliloquy, the linguistic pursuit of ideas. Its characters interact with each other, not their environment, because (as the subtitle reminds us) the play is a fantasia: There is something internal and not quite real about it.

    I also like his conclusion:

    Whether you regard capitalism as the thing that will save the world or the thing that will destroy it, the marketplace has proven capable of assimilating gay male notions of masquerade, subterfuge, and subversion without itself being subverted by them. By which I mean that there was a George Bush as president when Kushner first wrote Angels, and there is a George Bush as president now. By which I mean that perhaps it isn’t the movie that doesn’t do the play justice, it’s the times. By which I mean, finally, that as soon as I finished watching Angels, the only thing I could think of doing was watching it again because I wanted it to have another chance.

  • Quartet

    Quartet

    My wife surprised me yesterday afternoon with the Angels in America soundtrack. “Quartet” accompanies the scene that holds the rare honor of having made me cry two nights in a row. What can I say? Art is my refuge from a life of hardened cynicism. I can only imagine what condition I’ll be in on Sunday night when Louis delivers the Kaddish.

    But back to “Quartet” . . .

    Angels is so powerful in performance because Kushner understands juxtapositions. The best example is when Louis unleashes upon Belize a rambling diatribe about “the limits of liberal tolerance,” while, on the other side of the stage, Prior undresses for a medical examination, revealing his emaciated, lesion-pocked body to the audience. Or when Louis tells Prior that he’s leaving, while, on the other side of the stage, Joe finally owns up to the truth, reducing Harper to a broken shell. (And have I mentioned how good Mary-Louise Parker is?) That is the scene that got me both times I watched Millennium Approaches — Harper’s cry for Mr. Lies to take her away and Prior’s desperate scream from his hospital bed. I have minor complaints with the film, but Nichols got that scene just right.

    Thomas Newman’s score mines familiar ground, and “Quartet,” in particular, harkens to his work on American Beauty. But, all in all, the music serves the film quite well. I particularly like the main theme, which is carried by the strings and often placed in tension with a solo oboe line — a nice musical motif that echoes the ambiguous battle of angels and man.

  • Minor Quibbles

    Well, crap. I’m thrilled so far with Angels. Mary-Louise Parker is stealing the show as Harper, and Justin Kirk is fantastic as Prior. The homage to Cocteau and the casting of the prior Priors were both brilliant. But why, in their trimming and reshaping, did Kushner and Nichols have to cut my two favorite lines from Millennium Approaches? When we first see Harper, she really should be saying:

    People who are lonely, people left alone, sit talking nonsense to the air, imagining…beautiful systems dying, old fixed orders spiraling apart…

    When you look at the ozone layer, from the outside, from a spaceship, it looks like a pale blue halo, a gentle, shimmering, aureole encircling the atmosphere encircling the earth. Thirty miles above our heads, a thin layer of three-atom oxygen molecules, product of photosynthesis, which explains the fussy vegetable preference for visible light, its rejection of darker rays and emanations. Danger from without. It’s a kind of gift, from God, the crowning touch to the creation of the world: guardian angels, hands linked, make a spherical net, a blue-green nesting orb, a shell of safety for life itself. But everywhere, things are collapsing, lies surfacing, systems of defense giving way…This is why, Joe, this is why I shouldn’t be left alone. [ellipses are Kushner’s]

    So much of the play is built from that imagery, established so early on. I imagine that Nichols thought it just too much for the opening moments of the film — too theatrical, too obvious, too wordy for a character we had just met. It’s Kushner at his best, though. “Systems of defense giving way” is, I think, the play’s richest metaphor.

    I was even more annoyed by the cutting of this brief exchange, which really should follow Belize’s description of the sky as “mauve.”

    Belize: All day long it’s felt like Thanksgiving. Soon, this…ruination will be blanketed white. You can smell it — can you smell it?
    Louis: Smell what?
    Belize: Softness, compliance, forgiveness, grace.

    Perestroika is about softness, compliance, forgiveness, and grace — grace, most of all. Can’t wait until next week.

  • For Shits and Giggles

    Meghan Keane has a review of Angels in America over at the National Review Online. I’m still waiting for a legitimate, conservative critique of the film — one that doesn’t expose the reviewer’s own ideological blindness. I expect conservatives to be offended by many of the lines spoken by Kushner’s characters; I expect conservative critics to acknowledge the distinction between the message of a particular character and the message of the work as a whole. But that is expecting too much of anyone who writes for a partisan magazine (whether the NRO or The Nation) in a climate like ours.

  • More Angels

    Richard Goldstein offers the best one-paragraph synapsis of Angels in America that you’ll ever read. (He also talks to Kushner about Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, the problems of liberalism, and his new musical, Caroline, or Change.)

    In Angels, every character you expect to be good is capable of evil, and everyone who ought to be evil can love. Never have there been so many caring, sexy Mormons in a work by a card-carrying lefty. As for the Angel, she has eight vaginas and the means to use them—even on the dying faggot she transforms into a prophet through an orgasmic act. He ascends to heaven on a golden ladder, and just when you think you’re in a Christian potboiler about the rapture, it turns out that God has disappeared and the bureaucrats who run paradise want this prophet to end the human quest for change. But he rejects this temptation and demands “life . . . more life” instead: life as rebellion against celestial stasis; change as ecstatic, unmanageable pain. This is what the pioneer woman in Angels says when she pops out of a diorama at the Mormon Visitors Center: People change when God rips out their intestines, stuffs them back in a different way, and “it’s up to you to sew yourself up.” Benjamin tried to describe that ineffable process, and Kushner admits, “I’m indebted to Benjamin to the point of larceny.”

  • Radical Pragmatism

    In this new interview, Mother Jones calls Tony Kushner a “Radical Pragmatist,” a moniker I wouldn’t mind carrying myself. (It will take some effort on my part, though. I can’t imagine any aspect of my life or politics being described as “radical” right now. Baby steps.) He talks a bit about his and Robert Altman’s* failed attempt to film Angels a few years ago — nothing new if you’ve read their interview in either Tony Kushner in Conversation or Approaching the Millennium. The meat of the interview, though, is a discussion of the current political climate. I especially like this bit. Kushner is sounding more and more like John Rawls:

    There are a lot of politically active young people, but I feel that we’ve misled them. I have great admiration for the essayists and writers on the left, but the left decided at some point that government couldn’t get it what it wanted. As a result, it’s a movement of endless complaint and of a one-sided reading of American history, which misses the important point: Constitutional democracy has created astonishing and apparently irreversible social progress. All we’re interested in is talking about when government doesn’t work.

    On a related note, here’s a link to an editorial at GOPUSA.com that was inspired by Frank Rich’s piece from a week ago. It takes pot-shots at likely targets: Barbra Streisand and “the tinsel town left,” George Soros and Howard Dean (who is once again saddled with the now-mandatory modifier “McGovern-like”). Oh yeah, and you can also buy your copy of Treason there, so you know the site’s a bastion of fair and balanced journalistic integrity.

    * Fun Fact: When I spell-checked this post, Dreamweaver suggested I replace “Altman’s” with “Batman’s”

  • The Great Work Begins

    I can’t seem to muster enough energy to even care about the Reagan mini-series hubbub; carving out a nuanced position is completely beyond me. For largely economic reasons, CBS seems to have caved to partisan political pressure, which is lame and disheartening but neither illegal nor censorship. It’s not even particularly surprising. Come to think of it, I might actually be more offended by the idea of there being a Reagan biopic starring James Brolin than by the fact that I won’t get to see it. I mean, who would want to?

    I am intrigued, though, by the rising tide of commentary that links the mini-series with Angels in America. Frank Rich got the ball rolling with his piece in the Sunday Times. Then, yesterday, Andrew Sullivan posted a response at The New Republic. And now there’s word that Showtime will bump up its broadcast of the Reagan movie to November 30, exactly one week before HBO’s big premiere. In the Post article, Lisa de Moraes explains that Showtime President Robert Greenblatt “denied speculation that [his network] moved up the airdate to Nov. 30 because The Reagans, with all its juicy, audience-attracting controversy, was in grave danger of becoming roadkill when HBO debuted its adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play.” Greenblatt’s motivations are actually irrelevant to me; I’m more interested in the fact that the media has made that leap on its own, connecting the two films in a hotly politicized context.

    All three links are worth a read — I’m especially excited by Rich’s claim that “Angels is the most powerful screen adaptation of a major American play since Elia Kazan’s Streetcar Named Desire more than a half-century ago” — but I’m going to limit my comments to Sullivan’s piece, and, more specifically, to one aspect of it: his strangely ambivalent dismissal of Kushner’s play as “good Stalinist agitprop.” (I’m tempted also to take on his equally bizarre claim that “networks aren’t supposed to be” biased, but I’ll leave that argument to others better equipped and motivated to do so.)

    It is perhaps worth mentioning here at the start that Sullivan and Kushner have, as they say, “a history.” I haven’t followed it all too closely, but it’s been public at least since June ’94, when they appeared together, along with Donna Minkowitz and Bruce Bawer, on the Charlie Rose show to discuss the 25th anniversary of Stonewall. I haven’t seen the episode, but based on the transcript (available in Tony Kushner in Conversation) it appears that they spent a good portion of the evening throwing jabs at one another — Kushner accusing Sullivan of knocking down paper tigers, “one of them is the politics of the Left, as though there’s one politics of the Left”; Sullivan accusing Kushner of being “stuck in the McCarthy period….stuck in the late 1960s.” There was also Kushner’s commencement speech at Vassar, in which he took a none-too-subtle jab at “those newfangled neo-con gay people with their own website and no day job.” I don’t read Sullivan often enough to know if he responded in kind.

    But back to the piece in The New Republic. Sullivan writes:

    Exhibit A in the attempt to turn the human tragedy of AIDS into political agitprop was Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. As such, it appealed and still appeals to the hard left, which is partly why it won a Pulitzer and entirely why Frank Rich of The New York Times single-handedly championed it in the 1990s.

    That Angels is a fiercely political play goes without saying. And, yes, I imagine that its particular politics would be more appealing to those of a leftist bent. But to reduce the play to agitprop — a rhetorical ploy of the laziest variety — demands a grossly simplistic reading of a work that delights in ambiguity. Later, Sullivan seems to acknowledge as much in a back-handed compliment, calling Kushner’s play “a magical realist fantasy — where dreams become enacted, angels appear, and all sorts of metaphors are turned into dramatic imagery.” Even Roy Cohn, who Sullivan (accurately) describes as “an emblem of all the hard left despises,” is treated by Kushner with tremendous grace. Sure, the character Louis describes Cohn as “the pollstar of human evil,” but anyone who has seen or read the play with at least a modicum of maturity and human understanding will surely remember Roy’s death scene — a moment of suffering and humor and mourning and, perhaps most surprising of all, forgiveness. (I can’t wait to see Pacino and Streep together.)

    To be fair, Sullivan’s biggest beef here seems to be with Rich, who I would agree makes some questionable argumentative leaps. But Sullivan makes too many of his own. The historical record, he writes, “is complicated, hemmed in by political and scientific realities that neither Kushner nor Rich want to explore. Why? Because such nuance would get in the way of their anti-Republican hysteria.” He also compares Angels unfavorably to Randy Shilts’s As The Band Played On:

    Shilts’s sin — and the reason that he was vilified as viciously as Kushner was celebrated — is that he actually criticized some gay activists, as well as the Reagan administration, for resisting efforts to counteract the plague early enough. But in the polarized politics of AIDS, such complexities are generally unrewarded.

    Again, Sullivan’s reduction of Angels to simplistic, partisan politicking reveals his embarrassingly simplistic reading of the play and, I might add, some blatant partisanship (and personal anger?) of his own. Like Shilts’s book, Kushner’s play is actually quite critical of the American left, which is precisely why it’s a great play and not just one more Waiting for Lefty. The following paragraphs are the opening of a larger piece that might or might not end up in my dissertation.

    – – –

    Near the end of Millennium Approaches, the first part of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Louis Ironson asks, “Why has democracy succeeded in America?” then proceeds to answer his own question — sort of — rambling for several pages through a breathless and often hilarious (in a flummoxed, Woody Allen kind of way) litany of stereotypically liberal “fetishes” including, but not limited to: freedom, homophobia, human rights, race, anti-Semitism, and “the inescapable battle of politics” (1:89, 92). When his companion, an African-American ex-ex-drag queen named Belize, accuses Louis of spouting “racist bullshit,” Louis wilts, acknowledging that he probably is. “Oh I really hate that!” Belize sighs. “It’s no fun picking on you Louis; you’re so guilty, it’s like throwing darts at a glob of jello, there’s no satisfying hits, just quivering, the darts just blop in and vanish” (1:93).

    It’s a telling moment for Kushner, perhaps the most explicitly political of America’s top-tier playwrights. Set mostly in the mid-1980s, Angels in America is very much concerned with a particular moment in history when, as Louis’s debilitating ambivalence demonstrates, “being Left in this country” was more transgressive and exasperating than it had been since the consensus days of the Eisenhower administration. Reagan’s landslide victory over Mondale; the ideological partnering of the Republican party with the “Moral Majority”; the wholesale cutting of budgets to domestic social programs; the intensification of Cold War rhetoric and foreign policies of containment; and the ineffectiveness of key left-leaning organizations to stem this tide — all contributed to a crisis point in the history of the American Left. Kushner has said of the era:

    the play is set — and I think this is very important — at a time when there’s no such thing [as mass-movement politics] in the United States for generally progressive people. For someone like Belize, there isn’t anything: The Rainbow Coalition has started to waffle and fall apart. And there is nothing in the gay community — there’s the Gay Pride parade, and Gay Men’s Health Crisis getting humiliated at the City Council in Newark every year — 1984-1985 was a horrible, horrible time. It really seemed as if the maniacs had won for good. (Savran 27)

    Throughout Angels and much of his other early work, Kushner responds directly to this crisis with equal parts vitriol and, perhaps more surprisingly, a tempered optimism. In that same interview he asks a critical question of the Left, one that guides his plays and that should likewise guide the formation of any contemporary progressive politics, or so he implies. “So none of these people had anything they could hook into, which is the history of the Left,” Kushner says. “When the moment comes, when the break happens and history can be made, do we step in and make it or do we flub and fail?” (Savran 27).

    – – –

    Ultimately, Angels in America is unable to offer a single, simple answer to Kushner’s own question — or, at least, a single, simple, political answer. Hell, as the curtain closes, Louis and Belize are still arguing, now about Israel and Palestine. But there’s something in the play itself — in its humanism and poetry, its theology and ambiguity, its campy theatricality and epic reach — that does inspire a strange longing (in me, at least) for progress (whatever that means) and for something like collective action, though not of the variety that would likely send Sullivan’s knee-a-jerkin’. Prior’s closing lines are a benediction, with all of the stickiness that word implies:

    You are fabulous creatures, each and every one.
    And I bless you: More Life.
    The Great Work Begins.

    If Sullivan reads Angels in America as a Stalinist tract, then I pity his ideological blindness. He’s missing a hell of a play.

  • Going Digital

    Mike, do you feel that these days you can actually do bolder things on television than you can in film?

    Nichols: I do, yes. It has to do with HBO, it’s as simple as that. We love HBO and we love the freedom that there is on HBO, and the power. And what is that power? It’s economic. You know, we’re run by market forces—the fact that an outfit can make a billion dollars a year just sitting there collecting its subscriptions. It’s an economic basis that affords us this freedom.

    HBO’s economic freedom is just one of the many topics of discussion over at Newsweek, where Mike Nichols, Tony Kushner, and their cast are talking up Angels in America. In preparation for the big premiere, I called my cable provider last week to find out how much it would cost to add just HBO to my basic service package. “You’re new monthly bill will be $61.50,” the surprisingly helpful saleswoman told me. “Or,” she paused, tying her carrot to the stick, “for just a few dollars more, we can upgrade you to digital cable and throw in the full compliment of HBO/Showtime channels, plus an additional tier of your choice.”

    So, of course, I now have digital cable.

  • Film and Stage

    In a recent interview with Cate Blanchett, Stuart Husband mentions that the actress has dropped out of an up-coming film adaptation of Patrick Marber’s play, Closer. I would be more disappointed — she’d be great in the role — but for the fact that I didn’t even realize that the film was in the works. It’s going to sport a fine cast, otherwise. Should be interesting. On a slight tangent, I looked up Marber at the IMDb and discovered that another of his plays, Asylum, is also being filmed, starring Ian McKellen.

    Closer will be directed by Mike Nichols, who apparently is going to finish out his career by filming great plays. Two months and counting until I fire up my one-month subscription to HBO in order to watch Nichols’s rendition of Angels in America. Quotes like this have certainly piqued my interest:

    In writing his first screenplay, Kushner shortened his work by roughly 90 minutes and made changes likely to be incorporated when the play is published again.

    “I don’t think that we changed very much in the first part,” Kushner said. ” `Perestroika,’ I knew when I was writing it, was going to be one of those plays that you can rewrite for the rest of your life.” Nichols helped him fix a scene that had never worked onstage. “I don’t think I want to say which one it was, because I don’t want everybody to sort of pay special attention to it,” Kushner said. But Nichols told him the scene violated the play’s inner logic.

    “Tony and Mike found a rapport so quickly,” executive producer Cary Brokaw added. “Mike wanted consciously to be true to the play, and found the more we examined the script, as a true adaptation of the play, that it was incredibly cinematic. It didn’t need fixing. It just worked.”

    This snippet from Meryl Streep ain’t bad either:

    “We’re all lucky to have been in this,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re living and writing and working,” she said to Kushner. “I don’t expect to get anything remotely as ambitious as this piece of work in my life again, so I’m grateful to you.”

    Damn. I’m giddy.

  • What Am I Doing Here?

    I found today’s featured link while digging around the homepage of Dr. David Reidy, a member of UT’s philosophy department. If all goes according to plan, I hope to sit in on his political philosophy seminar this fall — a course on John Rawls and His Critics. If things don’t go according to plan, I’ll just crib his reading list and learn something about liberalism on my own.

    But back to today’s featured link . . .

    I was thrilled to find on Dr. Reidy’s site a link to Tony Kushner’s May 26, 2002 commencement address at Vassar, which I’d never read before. His speech is built upon the simplest of conceits, and one that I’m sure must have plagued every speaker who has ever faced the task of sitting down behind a computer or over a pad of paper and writing words that will inspire, amuse, and inform college graduates (and their debt-ridden families) on this strangely ceremonial day. His conceit? Why Me? and What am I doing here?

    As usual, Kushner is worth reading if for no other reason than the awesome playfulness of his language. Here, in one of the address’s many rambling, paragraph-long sentences, he gets really damn close to describing that confusing mess, life:

    You could ask your parents WHY ME, if in asking you mean how did I come to be like this; they, after all, made you, at least some of you, no one will ask them to take responsibility for the whole of you, but if in asking WHY ME you are inquiring after the specifics of your specificity, WHY AM I ME AND NOT SOMEONE ELSE, you could begin by looking into your origins; some of the answers can be found in your home, and by setting the answers you glean through observation, coercion and psychoanalytic psychotherapy in a dialectical spin with the facts of your place in history, in time, your place in the world at large, in the culture which is your larger context, in the ideology you have inherited and I hope transformed by living and which with your psyche is the prism through which your self or your soul is refracted, the light and air baffle which your flame or the smoke from your smouldering traverses to reach the exterior world, by setting the inner and the outer up as combatants on the epic dramatic stage in your head, you will arrive, maybe by the time you’re 80, maybe earlier if you work hard at it, at some understanding of yourself, if you don’t fear the dark night of the soul you will; and you won’t fear it so much as long as you remember that no one is happy, only Bush is happy; the best you can hope for is to be happy-ish; remember too that the real value of a dark night of the soul is that it’s maybe the surest way of ascertaining that you have one, a soul that is.

    The “What am I doing here?” part is where Kushner gets to talk politics, and, as usual, he takes full advantage of the opportunity, tearing into Bush, Cheney, Andrew Sullivan (though subtly here), the Greens, and the ideologies of individualism and consumerism.

    one of the answers to the WHAT question ought to be: I am here to organize. I am here to be political. I am here to be a citizen in a pluralist democracy. I am here to be effective, to have agency, to make a claim on power, to spread it around, to rearrange it, to democratize it, to legislate it into justice. Why you? Because the world will end if you don’t act. You are the citizen of a flawed but actual democracy. Citizens are not actually capable of not acting, it is not given to a citizen that she doesn’t act, this is the price you pay for being a citizen of a democracy, your life is married to the political beyond the possibility of divorcement. You are always an agent.

    And then he gives advice and quotes a beautiful poem by Czeslaw Milosz and reminds us of something that we should all know anyway — that we could all stand to read more Emerson, but especially the “Divinity School Address” — and then, as if that weren’t already more than any graduating class could ever deserve (even if it is a graduating class at Vassar), he sends us off with words that sound like they could be spoken by a character in a Tony Kushner play:

    It’s time to stop talking. Oh it always goes like this, I start out not knowing what to say and before I know it I can’t shut up. So commence already! A million billion mazels to you and your parents and your teachers and Vassar for having done so self-evidently magnificent a job. I am certain you are aflame. Hurry hurry hurry, now now now, damn the critics and the bad reviews: the world is waiting for you! Organize. Speak the truth.

    Amen!

  • Give ‘Em Hell, Bill

    A few days ago I read John Nichols’s report from the Take Back America conference, where Bill Moyers delivered a rousing speech “that legal scholar Jamie Raskin described as one of the most ‘amazing and spellbinding’ addresses he had ever heard.” Naturally I was anxious to read it for myself, and now a full transcript is finally available online. In just under 6,000 words, Moyers outlines the history of America’s Populist and Progressive movements, unearths the historical precedents for the Grover Norquist / Karl Rove School of Realpolitik, and issues a challenge to left-leaning politicians and voters alike: “This is your story – the progressive story of America,” he concludes. “Pass it on.”

    It really is a fantastic speech — much too long for me to adequately comment on it here. I do want to snip this one paragraph, though, which reminded me of something I had written just a few days ago.

    In “Sin and Society,” written in 1907, [Edward A. Ross] told readers that the sins “blackening the face of our time” were of a new variety, and not yet recognized as such. “The man who picks pockets with a railway rebate, murders with an adulterant instead of a bludgeon, burglarizes with a ‘rake-off’ instead of a jimmy, cheats with a company instead of a deck of cards, or scuttles his town instead of his ship, does not feel on his brow the brand of a malefactor.” In other words upstanding individuals could plot corporate crimes and sleep the sleep of the just without the sting of social stigma or the pangs of conscience. Like Kenneth Lay, they could even be invited into the White House to write their own regulations.

    And a not-so-random snippet from “The Trouble with ‘Being Left in This Country’: Tony Kushner’s Progressive Theology” (a work in progress, all rights reserved):

    In A Bright Room Called Day, Kushner’s first major play, he dissects one of those “moments,” revisiting the final days of the Weimar Republic, when, with its competing factions divided by petty politics and by interference from the Cominterm in Moscow, the German Left stood idly by as the National Socialist Workers’ Party swept to power. In case the parallels between Weimar Berlin and Reagan-era Washington, D.C. were too obscure for that first audience who saw Bright Room in 1985 — or for any audience since, for that matter — Kushner also places on stage with his German characters a contemporary American Jewish woman. Zillah Katz — “BoHo/East Village New Wave with Anarcho-Punk tendencies” — is like a living embodiment of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt. A polemicist and provocateur, she repeatedly interrupts the relatively naturalistic drama in order to comment on the action, and she does so in an explicitly didactic fashion. At her most outrageous, Zillah screams at the audience: “REAGAN EQUALS HITLER! RESIST! DON’T FORGET, WEIMAR HAD A CONSTITUTION TOO!” And in an image that could serve as an epigraph for Kushner’s next play, Angels in America, she adds: “Don’t put too much stock in a good night’s sleep. During times of reactionary backlash, the only people sleeping soundly are the guys who’re giving the rest of us bad dreams.”

    “Sleep the sleep of the just” is my favorite line from Moyers’s speech. That strange metaphor — the idea that sleeping soundly somehow demonstrates moral rightness — has shown up in a few odd places lately, most notably in the frequent reports that President Bush is sleeping well despite (or, perhaps, because of) the war. Well thank God for small blessings, eh?

  • Snippets

    When asked by Michael Cunningham (author of The Hours) about one of my favorite scenes in Angels in America — the moment when the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg delivers the Kaddish for Roy Cohn — Tony Kushner had this to say:

    Forgiveness is a very complicated thing. It certainly became, as I wrote Perestroika, the chief issue because it became a big issue in the world, starting with perestroika, and all of these sort of democratic revolutions that were going on, not just in Eastern Europe, but also in Latin America for instance, where people really had to ask themselves, “Can you let go of the past?” Can you forgive somebody that’s done something really, really terrible to you? It’s undertheorized and underdiscussed in the Left. We don’t really have a morality that encompasses it, because Christian morality, which is a complete forgiveness, seems emotionally inadequate to most people. It’s an act of that kind of forgiveness; it’s something that most people aren’t capable of doing. And it also seems unjust in a way.

    After finally seeing Angels performed last fall, I left the theater thinking, “I’ll be damned. I never realized that these plays are about grace.” I wonder how Kushner would respond to that, particularly if he knew what kind of mystery that word holds for me. I hope that he would be encouraged. Along similar lines, Charlie Rose once asked him about “spirituality in America.” Kushner replied:

    I’m very ambivalent and undecided and confused about it. I’m a genuine agnostic. I don’t know, but I think that as we approach the millennium, it becomes clearer and clearer that there are features of human experience that the Left has traditionally not touched upon, including a sense of the miraculous and a sense of the magical. And as the Left develops in the face of whatever kind of world we’re looking at now, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the spiritual has to be factored in. The spiritual has to be examined in a new way. We don’t know how to do that yet, but we’re working toward that.

    That was in May, 1993. I wonder if they’ve made any progress.

  • Kushner on Bush

    Tony Kushner on President Bush and military intervention in Iraq:

    It’s very hard for me to ever say that I think unilateral military action on the part of United States can be a great thing at this point. The idea of the United States armed forces going in and suppressing and controlling a population of any sort is so fraught with history. . . . The minute we start dropping bombs on anybody, everybody feels very good for five minutes. And there is a fantasy sense that we’re still the number one country on earth because we can go in there and kick this person, and we forget we’re talking about this completely decimated country that was annihilated [a few] years ago and has never rebuilt.
    — from an interview with Craig Lucas on January 20, 1993.

    Yep. 1993. He was talking about that President Bush. I’ve just begun working through Tony Kushner in Conversation, edited by Robert Vorlicky. Here’s another interesting tidbit. Turns out that the Reagan administration wasn’t all bad. Kushner describing a federal grant that helped to fund the writing of Angels in America:

    The application for it was very honest. I said I was going to write a play about gay men and Mormons and Roy Cohn, sent it in to the federal government under Reagan, and thought, this will come back immediately with no money attached. Then they gave us this huge check. . . . It was Washington money with an eagle stamped on the check. So I felt, when I was writing it, that it was taxpayers’ money, and I do think that had some impact on the play’s scope.

    I wonder if Jesse Helms — the homophobic, anti-NEA Helms of old; not the kinder, gentler, post-Bono, pro-AIDS relief Helms — ever found out.

  • Homebody/Kabul

    Instead of beginning my dissertation prospectus, which really should be occupying a larger chunk of my life right now, I’ve discovered all sorts of distractions that can be justified away as “research.” The most recent was Tony Kushner’s play, Homebody/Kabul, which I picked up in hopes that it might be useful when it comes time to write my conclusion — you know, in the spring of 2004. See how it works? By reading a play a year-and-a-half in advance, I avoid feeling guilty for my inexcusable procrastination. The story of my life.

    I’m hesitant to draw any conclusions after only one reading of Homebody/Kabul, except to say that, once again, Kushner has proven that he writes dialog with more magic and beauty and poetry than anyone since Shakespeare. Quite a claim, I know, but I’d defend it against all comers. Only Kushner could weave such a confounding and sublime metaphor from a description of computer networking, spoken by the homebody of the title, a woman disillusioned by loss and her lifeless husband:

    I understand none of it and indeed it’s quite impossible imagining my husband having to do in any real way with processes so . . . speedy, myriad, nervous, miraculous. But that parti-colored cloud of gas there, in that galaxy there so far away, that cloud there so hot and blistered by clustering stars, exhaling protean scads of infinitely irreducible fiery data in the form of energy pulses and streams of slicing, shearing, unseeable light — does that nebula know it nebulates? Most likely not. So my husband.

    87 words from an Act 1, Scene 1 monologue that extends through 21 pages and a full hour of the performance, a monologue that sifts through the 5000 year history of Afghanistan, drawing out the beauty and the barbarity of a nation whose troubles have so recently become enmeshed with our own. Homebody/Kabul began rehearsals at the New York Theatre Workshop in October, 2001. This fact has led so many critics to call the play “eerily prescient” that Kushner’s boyfriend has suggested that he adopt it as a drag persona: Ms. Eara Lee Prescient. It is odd to read the play now, knowing that Kushner’s obsession began years before the rest of us knew what a Taliban was or that such thing as a Northern Alliance even existed. Maybe “cared” is a better word than “knew” for that last sentence.

    Hopefully I’ll have a full response to Homebody/Kabul written some time before Thanksgiving. Anything to keep me from that prospectus.

  • Angels in Phoenix

    I’ll eventually get around to writing (much) more about this, but I want to mention quickly that, while vacationing in Phoenix, Joanna and I had the chance to see Tony Kushner’s Angels in America at the Herberger Theater. After reading and rereading these plays over the last four years, after writing about them, after, in fact, creating a dissertation topic just as an excuse to spend more time with these characters and with Kushner’s language, I couldn’t believe my luck when I picked up a Sunday edition of the Arizona Republic and discovered that the Actors Theater was staging both parts on consecutive nights. It was awesome (and I really wish that the common use of that word hadn’t stripped it of its power). I was most looking forward to a scene in which the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg appears to help deliver the Kaddish to Roy Cohn. Like most scenes in these plays, its success depends on the actors and director striking a fine balance of tragedy and humor. I ended up in tears, stunned, once again, by a strange and extraordinary encounter with grace.

  • Angels in America: Millennium Approaches (1992)

    By Tony Kushner

    Note: These are my initial thoughts on Millennium Approaches, written as a journal assignment in the fall of 1998. I’m tempted to revise it or pull it down altogether, but I’ve decided to keep it up here as an artifact of sorts.

    – – –

    A copy of Perestroika is sitting within my reach. I refuse to open it until I finish this journal. In this first part of Angels in America, Tony Kushner offers a modern deconstruction of the American family drama, along with political/social commentary (and humor!), united perfectly in a crosshatch of formal realism and fantasy. Quite a feat. I’m not sure where to begin.

    “I took the bus that I was told to take and I got off — well it was the very last stop, so I had to get off.” — Hannah

    That Millennium Approaches references Tennessee Williams should not be a surprise. Kushner, a gay playwright whose work addresses issues of family, love, acceptance, and destruction, is obviously indebted to his predecessor. That his play so often references A Streetcar Named Desire specifically is of a bit more interest. The allusions are hardly subtle. In Harper, for instance, Kushner paints for us a portrait of what Blanche DuBois may have looked like while she still struggled for life at Belle Reeve. Like Blanche, Harper has genuinely fallen in love with a man whose homosexuality, admitted or not, has ruined both their relationship and her sanity. And also like Blanche and her desire for “magic,” Harper prefers “pretend-happy” to the ugly truth. “[It’s] better than nothing,” she tells Joe.

    Near the end of Millennium Approaches‘ first act, Harper finally confronts Joe about his sexuality. Her words are biting, laced with religious condemnation. “I knew you . . .” she tells him before stopping herself. “It’s a sin, and it’s killing us both.” I can practically hear the strains of music drifting through Blanche’s mind, stopped suddenly by a gunshot. Although Joe does not end his own life (reflecting, I think, some social change in America over the last forty years — the gay man musn’t necessarily be punished), Harper’s accusations do effectively end their admittedly superficial marriage. For Harper, as was famously the case with Blanche, the truth is too difficult to face. So instead, she slips into the darkness, both literally and metaphorically.

    Perhaps the most obvious allusion to Streetcar (aside from Prior’s and Belize’s quoting of it in Act 2, Scene 5) occurs near the beginning of Act 2. Joe returns to the apartment to find Harper “sitting at home, all alone, with no lights on. We can barely see her.” When Joe asks her why she sits in the dark and then turns on the light, Harper screams, “No,” and shuts them off again. By the end of Millennium Approaches, Harper, again like Blanche, has fled reality completely. It is only when she travels with Mr. Lies that Harper is able to survive in a “very white, cold place, with a brilliant blue sky above.”

    “Eric? This is a Jewish name?” — Rabbi Chemelwitz

    You’ve got to love any work that begins with a Rabbi eulogizing in a very Woody Allen/Mel Brooks kind of way, his sentiments alternating between moments of divine wisdom and hilarious asides. In Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud exposes the genealogy of the Jewish joke, noting its remarkably long and often self-critical history. The Jews, according to Freud, have developed such a rich comedic tradition as a response to centuries, millennia actually, of persecution and anti-Semitism. What better catharsis is there, he might say, than a good laugh?

    In Millennium Approaches, Kushner uses jokes in a similar manner, expanding their range, however, to encompass not only issues of anti-Semitism and Jewish stereotypes, but also of homophobia. The result, I think, is the formation of living, breathing, and oft-suffering characters, as opposed to the two-dimensional cutouts who often inhabit Gay and Jewish roles. Kushner acknowledges stereotypes, then undercuts them. “My grandmother actually saw Emma Goldman speak. In Yiddish,” Louis tells Prior. “But all Grandma could remember was that she spoke well and wore a hat.” Henny Youngman would be proud. “It’s an old Jewish custom to express love,” continues Louis. “Here, Grandma, have a shovelful. Latecomers run the risk of finding the grave completely filled.” The lines echo with Borscht Belt rim-shots. But instead of allowing the jokes to flatten Louis into a stereotype, Kushner uses them to expose other forces which have contributed in varying degrees to the formation of his identity — Louis is not just gay, not just well-educated, not just a word processor. Being aware of his identification as a Jew helps us better understand the many conflicts in Louis’ life. Jews aren’t supposed to be gay. The importance of this conflict is, of course, echoed in Joe’s and Harper’s struggle. Mormons aren’t supposed to be gay either.

    Jokes, I think, are used in a similar manner to humanize the homosexual characters in Millennium Approaches. Again, Kushner acknowledges stereotypes — Prior exposing Louis’ embarrassment about his sibilant S, for instance. But he also moves beyond those stereotypes and confronts the audience with casual, though often graphic, references to homosexual sex. “Oh and by the way, darling, cousin Doris is a dyke,” Prior tells Louis. “You don’t notice anything. If I hadn’t spent the last four years fellating you I’d swear you were straight.” The discomfort lines like this would cause in a large audience would, I’m sure, be lessened somewhat when relieved through laughter.

    And that same laughter is also used to release the terrifying tension created by the play’s greatest threat: AIDS. During research for my thesis, I was surprised to learn that most within the Jewish-American community were unwilling to even mention the Holocaust until the mid-1960s. Much of that silence seems to have been broken by people like Mel Brooks, whose Oscar-winning screenplay for The Producers featured the notoriously hilarious “Springtime for Hitler” song and dance scene. Millennium Approaches must have had much the same impact. Nearly a decade after its original production, and I was still shocked to hear Prior’s light-hearted resignation:

    K.S., baby. Lesion number one. Lookit. The wine-dark kiss of the angel of death . . . I’m a lesionnaire. The Foreign Lesion. The American Lesion. Lesionairre’s disease . . . My troubles are lesion . . . Bad timing, funeral and all, but I figured as long as we’re on the subject of death . . .

    I noticed that in the notes which accompany Perestroika, Kushner calls the play “a comedy,” distinguishing it from a “farce” and forbidding any amount of sentiment. Making a joke of “the subject of death,” I think, is this play’s greatest accomplishment, not because it makes light of a serious matter, but because it forces us to acknowledge — without the safe distance allowed by farce and sentimentality — the painful, human reality of that matter.

    “You have all these secrets and lies” — Harper

    I’m fascinated by the idea of trying to place Millennium Approaches in the tradition of the American family drama. It explores similar themes, particularly the destructive effects of secrets and the breakdown of communication. The obvious problem with this type of reading, however, is that, aside from Joe’s mother and Louis’ dead grandmother, there are few references to traditional, multi-generation families. But that, I think, is also the point. In writing the homosexual American experience, Kushner has, by necessity, thrown off common notions of family. Instead of the matriarchal “Mama” from A Raisin in the Sun, Kushner gives us Belize, a mothering drag queen, and Harper, a de-sexed woman who can only imagine fertility. Instead of offering unity within the biological family, Kushner shows us the isolated lives of gay men, first in Roy Cohn, then in the abandoned Prior. Instead of allowing an imagined familial bliss, Kushner exposes its failings. For some reason, I find the play’s saddest lines belong to Joe, who describes to Roy his inability to pass for someone “cheerful and strong.”

    Those who love God with an open heart unclouded by secrets and struggles are cheerful; God’s easy simple love for them shows in how strong and happy they are . . . I wanted to be one of the elect, one of the Blessed. You feel you ought to be, that the blemishes are yours by choice, which of course they aren’t. Harper’s sorrow, that really deep sorrow, she didn’t choose that. But it’s hers.

    As is often the case in American family dramas, the tragedy of Millennium Approaches stems from the inability of its characters to live honestly. Blanche DuBois’ husband committed suicide instead. Joe and Harper lived a loveless life together instead. Roy Cohn ignored the truth and sought power instead.