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PROFILES AFTER ANGELS Tony Kushner’s Promethean itch. BY JOHN LAHR n May 2, 2004, the humid Sun- cember, HBO aired Mike Nichols’s sixty- breath and figure out how we’re going to Oday that his musical “Caroline, or million-dollar film version, for which give this a respectable run on Broadway.” Change” was to transfer from the Pub- Kushner adapted the play and which Kushner admits that he is “preternatu- lic Theatre, downtown, to the Eugene starred Al Pacino and Meryl Streep. rally, even prenatally, thin-skinned.” He O’Neill Theatre, on Broadway, Tony (The film was nominated for twenty-one says, “I would like to care less about the Kushner left his apartment on the Upper Emmys and won a record eleven.) things other people say about me, but I West Side and ambled east through In Kushner’s view, however,“Caroline, can’t imagine caring less. I think people Central Park. He was seeking out Be- or Change”—a semi-autobiographical pay heavy prices for armor and callous- thesda Fountain and the statue of an account of the relationship between a ness.” Still, he adds,“it’s very hard to take angel that graces it to ask for blessing. For Southern Jewish boy, who has lost his criticism when it’s inept, when it kills the luck, on opening nights, Kushner usually mother, and his family’s saturnine maid, chances of that show being seen.” performs two rituals: before the curtain Caroline—is his best-told story.Based on For a while, he sat on the low perim- goes up he sings Cole Porter’s “Begin the “unexpected hidden life” of the Kush- eter wall of the Bethesda plaza, enjoying the Beguine”—a song that, according to ner family’s maid, Maudie Lee Davis, the the scene. His gaze finally came to rest his will, must be played, along with script is a radical departure from the stan- on the blousy bronze angel in the center Brahms’s Fourth and Mahler’s Resurrec- dard forms of Broadway musical distrac- of the fountain, which plays an important tion Symphony,at his funeral (“I envision tion. With its focus on race, class, and role in the finale of “Angels in America.” a lengthy service,” he has written. “Bring even economics,“Caroline” celebrates the In the Biblical tale of Bethesda, an angel lunch”); then, while the show is on, he ambivalent, instead of the upbeat.When appears on the surface of a pool and gives slips away for a Chinese meal. On this it opened last year at the Public, it earned the water healing powers. The statue, occasion, however, Kushner found him- a strong critical response, not all of it pos- Kushner explained,“commemorates the self doubly in need of luck. Not only itive. For some critics, the show’s psycho- naval dead of the Civil War. It’s the first would the opening of “Caroline” mark logical subtlety was hidden beneath the commissioned sculpture by a woman in his return to Broadway after more than a folkloric, seemingly simplistic style of the New York—Emma Stebbins, the sister decade but a revised, nearly four-hour production. (“ ‘Caroline’ might be regarded of the parks board president and a les- version of his play “Homebody/Kabul” as the brooding person’s ‘Hairspray,’” Ben bian.” He went on, “The other thing I was beginning a limited engagement at Brantley wrote in the Times.) Kushner love about it is that it got terrible reviews the Brooklyn Academy of Music. felt, he says, “hugely disappointed” and when it was unveiled.” Kushner had last been represented on only “cautiously,but definitely,endorsed.” Broadway in 1993, with “Perestroika,” Nevertheless, throughout the winter ushner is a purveyor of what he calls the second part of his seven-hour epic, and into the spring, bolstered by the K“brave art”—“the best sense we can “Angels in America.”The first major play growing demand of the Public’s audi- make of our times.” Several weeks be- to put homosexual life at the center of its ences and by the success of the Nichols fore “Caroline” opened on Broadway,in a moral debate, “Angels” covered territory film, Kushner worked the phones and debate sponsored by the Classic Stage that ranged from Heaven to earth, from called in favors until a consortium of Company,one of Kushner’s great cham- the AIDS epidemic to conservative poli- twenty Broadway producers put up five pions, the critic Harold Bloom, spent the tics, encapsulating, in its visionary sweep, million dollars to move the musical to better part of two hours trying in vain the sense of confusion and longing that Broadway. No one was going to get rich, to get Kushner to admit that he was a defined late-twentieth-century Ameri- their mantra went, but Broadway would theological writer. “I’m somebody who can life. “It gave a language to that gen- be the richer for it. The Broadway open- believes in . a kind of relationship of eration,” the director George C. Wolfe, ing meant another round of reviews. “It complaint and struggle and pursuit be- who staged both “Angels in America” would be lovely if suddenly there was sort tween the human and the divine,” Kush- and “Caroline, or Change” on Broadway, of this Pauline conversion and people ner said finally.“And part of that struggle says. “It gave playwrights permission to were coming and saying,‘I was wrong the involves politics. For me, drama without think about theatre in a whole new way. first time; it’s great now,’ ” Kushner said. politics is inconceivable.” A play could be poetic, ridiculous, fragile, “But that isn’t going to happen. Tomor- He is fond of quoting Melville’s he- overtly political, sentimental, and brave all row there’ll be some wonderful things roic prayer from “Mardi and a Voyage at the same time.”“Angels” won Kushner and also maybe some not-so-wonderful Thither” (“Better to sink in boundless two Tonys and a Pulitzer Prize. Last De- things. Then we have to take a deep deeps, than float on vulgar shoals”), and LEVINE DAVID 42 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 3, 2005 TNY—01/03/05—PAGE 42—133SC. In theatre, Kushner is a purveyor of “brave art,” which he defines as “the best sense we can make of our times.” TNY—01/03/05—PAGE 43—133SC.—LIVE OPI ART—R 13521 takes an almost carnal glee in tackling the tuba and spouting water from her mouth. (He refers to Samuel Beckett as “that most difficult subjects in contemporary “Homebody/Kabul,” which began with a matzoh of a playwright.”) In his 1995 history—among them, AIDS and the con- first-person monologue, morphed into a collection of essays,“Thinking About the servative counter-revolution (“Angels in third-person drama, moving unexpect- Longstanding Problems of Virtue and America”), Afghanistan and the West edly from closeup to long shot. With its Happiness,” Kushner writes, “A good (“Homebody/Kabul”), German Fascism visions and poetic fulminations, “Angels play, like good lasagna, should be over- and Reaganism (“A Bright Room Called in America” expanded the expressive lim- stuffed. It has a pomposity, and an over- Day”), the rise of capitalism (“Hydrio- its of naturalistic theatre. Likewise,“Car- reach. Its ambitions extend in the di- taphia, or the Death of Dr. Brown”), and oline, or Change” used its visual, sonic, rection of not-missing-a-trick, it has a racism and the civil-rights movement in and linguistic vernacular to create a kind bursting omnipotence up its sleeve.” the South (“Caroline, or Change”). But of American folk opera, in which the his plays, which are invariably political, worlds of white privilege and African- he swashbuckling quality of Kush- are rarely polemical. Instead, Kushner re- American impoverishment were woven Tner’s intellectual aspirations is not jects ideology in favor of what he calls “a together in a dreamlike fable that bore borne out by his demeanor. At forty-eight, dialectically shaped truth,” which must the influence of Kushner’s friend Mau- he is tall, courtly, unassuming, and flat- be “outrageously funny” and “absolutely rice Sendak, with whom he has written a footed, with a tangle of wiry black curls— agonizing,” and must “move us forward.” children’s book and an opera libretto. his “wackadoo hair,” as his friend the di- He gives voice to characters who have Underneath Kushner’s prodigious flow rector Michael Mayer calls it. He is by been rendered powerless by the forces of language is a sense of incantation, nature a “fummfler”—what Sendak calls of circumstance—a drag queen dying of which draws the spectator in and com- “the Jewish fumbler who is in perfect con- AIDS, an uneducated Southern maid, con- pels him to listen. His writing is defined trol, who uses his comic character to some- temporary Afghans—and his attempt to by fluency and excess. He wrote the first how make everyone feel comfortable and see all sides of their predicament has a sly draft of the opening monologue for loose.” He talks extraordinarily fast, with subversiveness. He forces the audience to “Homebody/Kabul” in forty-eight hours, a machine-gun-style delivery that reflects identify with the marginalized—a hu- “Caroline” in four and a half months, both his swiftness of mind and his ner- manizing act of imagination. and he had just finished a two-hundred- vousness. At the same time, his pace gives Kushner also has what he calls “a and-eighty-three-page draft of a screen- him a distinct comic advantage. When boundless appetite” for exploring the play for Steven Spielberg about the after- delivering the Class Day speech at Co- dramatic form.