brief response and addendum to ANGELS IN AMERICA review

I contend, and will forever contend, that if a critic writes in his or
her review about how Angels is not really as important or
ground-breaking as everyone says it is then the production he or she
saw did not do its job.  

and now, for an interview with John Lahr on Tony Kushner and the sheer
magnitude of his genius.

The Big Talker
Issue of 2005-01-03
Posted 2004-12-27

This week in the magazine, John Lahr profiles the playwright Tony
Kushner, the author of "Angels in America" and the musical "Caroline,
or Change." Here, with Ben Greenman, Lahr discusses Kushner, the
nature of his talent, and his influence on American theatre.

BEN GREENMAN: When did you first become aware of Tony Kushner as a
playwright?

JOHN LAHR: "Angels in America" was one of the earliest reviews I did
for Tina Brown, who was then the editor of The New Yorker. What we
were trying to do at the time was change the nature of the reviews
that we were writing. We were going to do insider reviews, for which
we were going to see the playwright and talk about the play. It was
meant to give you much more of a sense of the world of the theatre.
Kushner was my first insider piece. And so I met with him on the
opening night of the two "Angels in America" plays being done at one
time?it was the first time ever?and he was extraordinary. I had reread
the play on the plane, and it was unbelievably huge and ambitious, and
the ending, where Prior Walter steps out of the play and gives a
blessing, was hugely moving. It was great to meet Kushner, and to talk
with him, because he's unusually fast-speaking and fast-thinking, with
a kind of encyclopedic mind. He was also a whole different person
then?he was about a hundred pounds heavier. He had been eating and
eating, just out of anxiety. I remember standing with him outside the
Mark Taper Forum, and learning, hilariously, about his pre-show
ritual. He said, "I do two things: I sing the entire song of Cole
Porter's `Begin the Beguine,' which I have to sing perfectly"?this
gives you an idea of how obsessive he was. "It's the longest single
song in the American songbook, for some reason, I don't know quite
why. And I have to take myself off for a Chinese meal." And, in the
case of this particular evening, since there were two plays, he had to
have two meals.

He did the whole thing once per play?

Yes. He was laden down with all these rituals, and he was carrying his
mother's special cross, and off he went, this hefty guy with a
rucksack. The deal we cut was that I would meet him after the show,
that I would go backstage. I went, and there he was, dazed and
rumpled, surrounded by all these people. He had just pulled off one of
the major plays of the postwar period. And on the bulletin board was
this letter that he had tacked up. It was a kind of grace note for the
cast and crew. This is what it said: "And how else should an angel
land on earth but with the utmost difficulty? If we are to be visited
by angels we will have to call them down with sweat and strain, we
will have to drag them out of the skies, and the efforts we expend to
draw the heavens to an earthly place may well leave us too exhausted
to appreciate the fruits of our labors: an angel, even with torn
robes, and ruffled feathers, is in our midst." Beautiful. Typical Tony.

So you had a very clear sense even then that you had witnessed
something extraordinary?

Oh, yes. Out front was every major American producer and every major
American critic, and the sense was that a major event was happening,
which I had never quite seen in my lifetime. In fact, historically,
there are only two other plays that have had that kind of life.
Clifford Odets's "Awake and Sing!" in a night catapulted him from
nowhere to being the playwright of the thirties. And then, after the
war, in 1945, there was Tennessee Williams's "The Glass Menagerie,"
which also typified its era, in shifting from the social to the
private, from the public concerns and the propagandizing throughout
the thirties to this sort of internal world. This new voice, Kushner's
voice, caught so much of the longing and anguish and historical content.

You mention Odets and Williams, and, obviously, of those two, Williams
is a better match for modern sensibility. Odets has become more dated.
How aware is Kushner of how large this one play looms in his body of
work, both for what he has written and for what he hasn't yet written?
And, second, is he worried about the aesthetic custodianship of it in
the future? Is legacy a problem for him as well?

You know, I think that it probably is for every playwright. Let me
say, first of all, that in front of his computer at his summer house
is a picture of Williams. So he's in a direct line as a romantic
individualist to Williams. Like Williams, who coined the phrase "the
catastrophe of success," the impact of his fame?not so much because of
"Glass Menagerie," which was a kind of throwback, but certainly
because of "A Streetcar Named Desire," in 1947?was so all-encompassing
that it rocked him and changed him in a way that no writer can
predict. When something touches the chord of a culture, there is a
certain amount of magic in it. You don't know that you're going to do
that. And it's slightly unhinging. It unhinged Williams, and it
unhinged Kushner. He couldn't write for a long time. I think that he
has to sort of psychologically come to terms with the fact that this
is probably the greatest play he will ever write. He's a great writer,
but it's a conjunction of luck, talent, and the moment. And the moment
that his play helps to define then passes.

For a maximalist, there's a good chance that the first mature work
will be the best, or, at least, the most definitive, because it's the
work that contains everything. For that reason, I was interested in
the portion of your article in which you talk about Kushner's
determination to continue to experiment formally. That seems like one
way out, in a way, for him.

I think that's a good point. Formal experimentation means that he can
allow for a lot of failure. Still, in this decade, he has written, I
think, two masterpieces. "Caroline, or Change" is a masterpiece of its
kind, and although it didn't get the critical press it deserved, it
was certainly outstanding. Tony thinks, and I agree with him, that it
is a better-told story than "Angels in America," in the sense that it
has a very clear through line. With "Angels in America," he didn't
understand about change in drama. What he learned in the writing of
that play was how to make conflict pay off in a narrative way, and
then, ten years later, you find him writing in a very tight and
difficult form, the musical form?"Caroline, or Change" is really a
folk opera. It's a very beautiful work. And, oddly enough, when you
talk to him, Tony is more certain of the future of "Caroline, or
Change" than of "Angels."

As a theatrical work?

Yes. "Caroline," at least initially, had nowhere near the critical
press or the life in New York of "Angels." But then again, after 9/11
the theatre has changed. Good theatre is supposed to make you think.
It creates doubt?it creates, by its very nature, ambiguity. The
culture is still, I would argue, very much traumatized by 9/11, and
thought is the last thing it wants from the theatre. It wants to be
tickled to death. And therefore what you've got is row upon row of
theatres doing just revivals and mindless stuff. It always did fairly
mindless stuff, but there's really no place for new things in theatre
at the moment.

How has Kushner influenced other playwrights? Where is his influence
most evident?

In bravery. In taking chances. In following the dictates of the
narrative that is being written, rather than allowing the narrative to
be dictated by commercial forces. In showing that there are many ways
to tell a story. If you look at the structure of "Angels," you see
that it's a collage of styles. There's not one uniform style, which is
the sort of commercial formula of naturalism or surrealism. Tony is
mixing things in a very daring way. It is sui generis. Nobody's
repeated it. But what it did was shake up the nature of storytelling,
I think, for a lot of younger writers. It has encouraged them to be
more free, or wild, in their storytelling, and to not stick to one
tone, or one voice.

Obviously, there are other playwrights as formally daring?Caryl
Churchill, for example. And there are other playwrights who have
tackled gay topics. But no one else has anywhere near the mainstream
appeal. Is this an accident of history, or is it more dependent upon
his talent?

I think it's largely dependent on his talent, and on one part of the
talent: Kushner's a funny guy. He can tell a joke, and he's really a
good writer of jokes?in fact, the first offer of work he got after
"Angels in America" was to write "The Flintstones." He got called by a
Hollywood producer, and he said, "Just out of curiosity, why are you
calling me?" And they said, "You can write funny." What the
avant-garde generally wants is mass communication, but it doesn't like
the mass. Tony respects the mass. He wants to politically affect the
largest number of people he can. He doesn't want to just experiment in
a room. He has the ability to be popular?he goes to the audience.

The HBO movie of "Angels in America" is an interesting part of this,
too?it brought the play to millions of people who hadn't already seen
it. How did Kushner feel about the new version?

Oh, well, he did the adaptation. He loved it. He wants to get into
film. Right now, he's writing a film script for Steven Spielberg about
the aftermath of the `72 Olympics, the terrorism at Munich. That seems
surprising to me, but Kushner is a craftsman, and he also likes the
large arena. He's in every way a large figure, which is interesting to
me. In the time after "Angels in America" and before "Caroline," when
he really couldn't quite figure out how to maneuver his fame, he
invented himself as a sort of public spokesman for causes. And he can
do that. He's just always thinking, and always engaged. And in that
sense he's very much a model playwright. He's operating in the world
and in his art. It remains to be seen how that sort of trade-off
goes?whether he'll be more a man of the public or a man of his own
work. But, as I say, he's done two masterpieces in a decade, in two
different forms, which I think are enduring.

There's also an interesting aspect to him, as you say, as a public
intellectual.

I don't think that anybody now has Kushner's stature, except for the
sort of solitaries, like David Mamet and Neil LaBute and Wallace
Shawn, who are wonderful writers but very private and hidden. Tony is
out there with his homosexual activism, his very public marriage. He's
out there using his fame to fight the powers that be. He was down in
Florida trying to get votes for Kerry. And, you know, God bless him.
Most playwrights of that kind of celebrity don't leave their suites.
In Europe, he is the definitive modern American Playwright, with a
capital "A," capital "P." And the interesting thing about him is that
he manages. I mean, it killed Odets, it absolutely swamped him. Odets
was finished. He went to Hollywood in the forties, and he wrote three
plays after he went there, and he died in the early sixties. So it
virtually stopped him as a spokesman and as a writer. Whereas with
Tony, in some sort of strange way, it's inspired him. His time is
filled very usefully. He doesn't waste his time, in the most
meaningful sense of the word. He's really working on himself and on
his art, and dealing with fame in a way that, say, Williams didn't.
Williams just ran from it, whereas Tony really tries to sort of put
his head down and crash through it to some other place. I admire him
for that.

This is probably, in a way, too facile, but all of his plays expressly
foreground the idea of change?"Caroline, or Change" does it in its
title. I assume that he is quite aware of this, and of the potential
problem: if his next play is a rehash of a previous one, it might be
financially or even critically rewarding, but there would be
diminishing returns at some point.

Absolutely. His interest in change and progress is sort of
ideological. He believes in that, and that's what he's looking for in
his stories. He's been working on an amazing story about a slave
called Henry Box Brown. But he just has to wait for the story to
arrive. And unfortunately, in the case of that story, it's taking an
awfully long time. But, in the case of "Caroline," he had the idea
when he was at Columbia.

Thirty years germinating? It seems like there's a pretty rich mixture
of impatience and patience.

The story was slightly different as he originally conceived it, but it
was always on his list. When he was deciding whether he could be a
playwright, he made a list of his ideas, and "Caroline" was in the top
ten. And here he is, twenty-five years later, doing it.

Does he have too many ideas?

I know that "genius" is such an overused word, but he is a kind of
genius, in the sense that there is a kind of texture to him. He's
prodigious?in language, in speech, in eloquence, in thought, in
reading; he just gobbles the world. It's wonderful and scary. I'm
envious of that ability to process so much, and to make those
connections. I can get there, but it just takes me about another five
weeks. But he's just that quick. Some people might argue that he
spreads himself too thin?you know, knock off a book on Maurice Sendak,
and do a story with him, in the middle of an opera, and then go make
some speeches. At a certain speed, all things disintegrate. But that
is the dilemma of celebrity, especially in this culture: everything is
available to you if you want to do everything. More than most, though,
Kushner is using his power and his acclaim for the world, to make the
world he is trying to make.

In 1993, you wrote a Talk of the Town piece about Kushner on the night
that "Angels in America" won a Tony for best play. What is the biggest
change in him in the past decade, as he's absorbed, and been absorbed
by, the shock waves from "Angels"?

I don't know, it's a good question. Tony has a watch that has a chip
with a hard drive that contains all his work. He has his entire oeuvre
on his wrist at any given time. And he loves fine food, he loves a
fine truffle sauce. When I met him, he was a struggling writer,
getting money from home, living like all writers live, until this show
hit. I suppose the biggest change in Tony is that he's living a life
that's more elevated. Nothing lavish, but he has his house in the
country and he drives his car, and he can take a vacation, and so, to
that extent, he's this crazed anarchist intellectual inside a rather
bourgeois body.

Well, that's a fine and enjoyable combination?I mean, assuming he
keeps working for what he wants to work.

And it also makes him incredibly surprising. It just frees him. I'm as
ambitious as the next writer, but what interested me about Tony was
that his ambitions are gargantuan. That impulse, that sense of being
empowered to try to do something as big as "Angels," comes from a
childhood where your imaginative world is completely endorsed. So, in
following that back, it was fascinating to me to see that it came back
to his mother, and his mother's frustrations, because she was a
first-rate musician who, as it were, had to defer her art for her
life. For Tony, all these accomplishments are, to a certain extent,
laid at her feet as a trophy, for that energy, and for the sense of
destiny that was put into him. He'll always be that way. It's always
going to be that way. Even if he were never to write another play, he
would still be aiming at those large targets.





 
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