The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures
by Tony Kushner
Directed by Michael Greif
At the Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis
AS A PLAYWRIGHT, Tony Kushner cannot be accused of compressing his scripts to crystalline perfection before trying them out on the public. In his latest play, as befits its unwieldy title, he permits his characters to engage in logorrheic speeches that test not only the lines themselves but often the patience of the audience.
Commissioned by the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, The Intelligent Homosexual‘s Guide was designed as the centerpiece of a three-stage “Kushner Celebration,” making full use of the Guthrie’s towering new facility designed by Jean Nouvel. “The play is set in Brooklyn in 2007,” Kushner told Lavender, Minnesota’s GLBT magazine, “and it involves a 75-year-old longshoreman and his three kids. Two of them are gay:
As his working title suggests, Kushner has returned to material familiar to admirers of Angels in America. “I stayed away from writing an explicitly gay play after Angels, because I didn’t want to do the same thing over again,” Kushner explained about the years spent shaping such works as Homebody/ Kabul, the book for the musical Caroline, or Change, and the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s film Munich. But it has been nearly two decades since Kushner’s “gay fantasia” took the theatre world by storm in the early 1990’s. Now, notes the 53-year-old playwright, it is “sort of okay” for him to return to gay-themed material.
What will become of Gus Marcantonio, the longshoreman, now that his homosexual son Pier “Pill” Luigi and his semi-lesbian daughter Maria Teresa, who goes by the acronym “Empty” (from “MT”) have returned? (A curiosity of the play is that two female characters who are identified as gay succumb to the sexual temptations of straight men.) Much like the title character in Marsha Norman’s play ’Night Mother (1983), Empty is saddled with an inevitably maudlin scene in which she ineffectually pleads with her father not to kill himself, a scene that manages to be unsettling despite its flirtation with the treacly.
Pill, in contrast to his nurturing sister, is a one-man wrecking ball.
Well-educated and pretentious yet self-pitying, self-absorbed, and almost fatally reckless with his own life and the well-being of those who care about him, Pill should by all rights be insufferable, but he’s just likable enough—perhaps we have the actor who played him to thank for this—that we don’t give up on him. But when it’s revealed that Pill has borrowed $30,000 from Empty to buy time with a young male prostitute, we begin to lose patience. And then there’s family patriarch Gus, who harbors, if not a Big Secret, then a Big Regret related to compromises he made decades earlier as a labor organizer; but the inadvertent discovery of a dusty suitcase sealed within the walls of his Brooklyn brownstone—the opening of which is delayed for dramatic effect—comes to nothing.
This is obviously a play still trying to find itself in terms of theme, character, and plot—witness that the writing in Act One is much stronger than in the two subsequent acts, yet to be refined. Indeed at the early performance that I attended, cast members were still carrying new pages of script around, so substantial changes may have been made to the play since then. As of last May, the play that Kushner was workshopping here in Minneapolis was still a sprawling and often prolix work in progress.
