The Guthrie Theater will celebrate the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner in a landmark series set for the spring of 2009. In addition to presenting the Guthrie commission, tentatively titled The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, the theater will also mount productions of Caroline, or Change and a collection of Kushner’s short plays as part of the upcoming 2008-09 Season. These three simultaneous productions will join a series of speakers, scholars and other special events designed to fully examine and celebrate Kushner’s body of work. For more information on the Kushner Celebration, visit www.guthrietheater.org.
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Kushner Clash
With any luck, the Guthrie’s Tony Kushner experiment will make at least a few Twin Citians angry.
By Tad Simons, Arts and Entertainment Editor
Mpls. St. Paul Magazine (May 2008)
Playwrights don’t matter much in this country – and by “don’t matter,” I mean that plays and playwrights have largely lost their ability to influence American culture in any meaningful way. Which is why the Guthrie Theater’s decision to stage in 2009 not one or two but three plays by Tony Kushner, simultaneously, along with an entire catalog worth of discussions, workshops, seminars, lectures, speeches, and other outreach programs, has to rank as one of the most ambitious (and quite possibly subversive) theater events ever to happen in this country, and certainly in the Twin Cities.
What the Guthrie is shouting as loudly as it possibly can with this landmark program is that Tony Kushner is a playwright who matters, and it is affording the public every conceivable opportunity to find out why.
Why indeed, and why now? And what, if anything, will it mean when it’s all over?
Tony Kushner is, of course, the author of Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, the seven hour epic that won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1993. But Tony Kushner isn’t just a playwright, he’s a human vortex for practically every significant social conflict the United States has grappled with in the past century. He’s gay: In Angels, he hurled himself headlong into the volatile Reagan-era politics of homosexuality and AIDS. He’s Jewish: In addition to addressing anti-Semitism in several plays, he’s co-written two books on Zionism and his views on what “progress” means in Israel have sparked more than a few shouting matches. He’s a socialist: Among other things, he thinks that defunding the arts and under funding education are deliberate schemes to stupefy Americans into political submission, and in interviews he regularly refers to Republicans as “insane.” He doesn’t have much use for religion, particularly the fanatical, repressive kind so much in vogue these days. About the only controversial thing Tony Kushner isn’t is black, though he did grow up in Louisiana and writes frequently and passionately about race.
All of which is to say that Tony Kushner is a cultural button-pusher of the highest order. He does everything a relevant artist – an artist who matters – is supposed to do: He challenges, provokes, debates, lampoons, critiques, lambastes, and ionizes the culture in which he lives; he has an uncanny way of anticipating what the next great national conversation is or should be (his play Homebody/Kabul, set in Afghanistan, was written and set to go into production at the New York Theatre Workshop on September 11, 2001); he asks big, uncomfortable questions about who we are as a country, what we are doing, and why; and he does it all in the name of democracy, patriotism, and art.
In short, Tony Kushner approaches his art much the way Shakespeare and Sophocles did – as a way to speak truth to power. So when the play the Guthrie has commissioned Kushner to write – the working title of which is The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures - it should surprise no one if, after the chorus of self-congratulation dies down, this play makes some people in our community a bit testy, possibly even angry.
We can only hope. Because if Kushner’s work here successfully registers some seismic activity in our community, it will mean that, for a little while at least, what a playwright had to say in 2009 was still of some importance to the rest of the world.
And make no mistake, the world will be listening. It’s difficult to overstate the magnitude and potential significance of this project; it’s simply unprecedented. It’s also a measure of the confidence artistic director Joe Dowling has in the new, improved Guthrie’s ability to take on larger, more complex artistic challenges, ones with potentially enormous national and international implications.
As Kushner himself has said, “The Guthrie is what theaters look like in heaven.” Now all he has to do is write the play and see how much hell he can raise.
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