The Playwright's Voice

American Dramatists on Memory, Writing and the Politics of Culture

David Savran

• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN:
  9781559361637
• eBook ISBN:
  9781559367110
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre Direction & Production

This new volume of interviews with contemporary playwrights attests to the fact the dramatic art is alive and well in America and celebrates the art and talent of fifteen of the theatre's most important artists. In extensive interviews, they discuss their work, influences and their craft and how the art form relates to our cultural heritage, as well as the state of theatre-its-meaning and purposes as we approach the 21st Century. David Savran lays out their remarkable achievements and provides telling insights to their work in his substantial introductions to each interview.

Interviews with: Edward Albee
Jon Robin Baitz
Philip Kan Gotanda
Holly Hughes
Tony Kushner
Terrence McNally
Suzan-Lori Parks
José Rivera
Ntozake Shange
Nicky Silver
Anna Deavere Smith
Paula Vogel
Wendy Wasserstein
Mac Wellman and George C. Wolfe.

Tony Kushner

When Bill Kushner diligently guided his fourteen-year-old son Tony through Wagner’s twenty-hour Ring cycle, he little suspected his prodigious offspring would end up some two decades later writing the theatrical epic of the 1990s.

For Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1992) has changed the face and scale of the American theatre. Having amassed the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, two Best Play Tony Awards and a spate of other prestigious awards, it has proven, against all odds, that a play can tackle the most controversial and difficult subjects—politics, sex, disease, death and religion—and still find a large and diverse audience. This achievement is even more remarkable when one considers that all five of its leading male characters are gay. Bringing together Jews and Mormons, African and European Americans, neoconservatives and leftists, closeted gay men and exemplars of the new queer politics, Angels is indeed a gay fantasia, writing a history of America in the age of Reagan and the age of AIDS.

Tony Kushner, a self-described “red-diaper baby,” was raised in Lake Charles, Louisiana, the son of professional musicians. The Kushner’s rambling house on the edge of a swamp teemed with pets and resounded with music. Young Tony developed an appreciation of opera and the Wagnerian scale of events from his father (Moby-Dick remains Tony’s favorite novel), while from his mother Sylvia’s involvement in amateur theatrics he learned to appreciate the emotional power of theatre. (He still vividly remembers her performance as Linda Loman in Death of a Salesman—and the tremendous identification he felt with her.) But at age six, when he developed a crush on Jerry, his Hebrew school teacher, he knew he was not like the other boys. Growing up, as he puts it, “very, very closeted,” he was intrigued by the sense of disguise theatre could offer. And because he had decided “at a very early age” that he would become heterosexual, he avoided the theatre in town, where he knew he would find other gay men.

In the mid-1970s, he moved to New York to attend Columbia, where he studied medieval art, literature and philosophy, and read the works of Karl Marx for the first time. Still fascinated with theatre, however, he explored the groundbreaking experimental work of directors like Richard Foreman, Elizabeth LeCompte, JoAnne Akalaitis and Charles Ludlam, immersed himself in the classical and modernist theatre traditions and got involved in radical student politics. It was not until after he graduated from Columbia, however, that he began to come out. And much like Joe Pitt in Angels, Part One: Millennium Approaches, he called his mother from a pay phone in the East Village to tell her he was gay.

Angels in America pays energetic tribute to these diverse experiences and inspirations. Drawing on Brecht’s political theatre, on the innovations of the theatrical avant-garde, and on the solidly American narrative tradition that stretches back to Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, it invents a kind of camp epic theatre—or in Kushner’s phrase, a “Theatre of the Fabulous.” Spanning the earth and reaching into the heavens, interweaving multiple plots, mixing metaphysics and drag, fictional and historical characters, revengeful ghosts and Reagan’s smarmy henchmen, Angels demonstrates that reality and fantasy are far more difficult to distinguish than one might think. It also verifies, as political activists have insisted since the 1960s, that the personal is indeed the political: exploring the sometimes tortuous connections between a personal identity (sexual, racial, religious or gendered) and a political position, it dramatizes the seeming impossibility of maintaining one’s private good in a world scourged by public greed, disease and hatred.

Yet Angels in America is not only a play about loss. For it consistently attests to the possibility not only of progress but also of radical—almost unimaginable—transfiguration. Its title and preoccupation with this utopian potential, inscribed in even the most appalling moments of history, are derived from an extraordinary mediator—the German-Jewish philosopher, Walter Benjamin. In Benjamin’s attempt to sketch out a theory of history in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” written in 1940 as he was attempting to flee the Nazis, this most melancholy of Marxists uses Paul Klee’s painting, Angelus Novus, to envision an allegory of progress in which the angel of history, his wings outspread, is poised between past and future. Caught between the past, the history of the world, which keeps piling wreckage at his feet, and a storm blowing from Paradise, the angel “would like to stay, awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed.” But the storm “has got caught in his wings” and propels him blindly and irresistibly into an unknown future.

For Kushner, the angel of history serves as a constant reminder both of catastrophe (AIDS, racism, misogyny and homophobia, to name only the most obvious) and of the perpetual possibility of change, the expectation that, as Benjamin puts it, the tragic continuum of history will be blasted open. And the concept of utopia to which he is linked ensures that the vehicle of enlightenment and hope in Angels—the prophet who announces the new age—will be the character who must endure the most pain: Prior Walter, a man born too soon and too late, suffering AIDS and the desertion of his lover. Moreover, in Kushner’s reinterpretation of American history, this utopia is inextricably linked both to the extraordinary idealism that has long driven American politics and to the ever-deepening structural inequalities that continue to betray and mock that idealism.

It is hardly coincidental that Angels in America should have captured the imagination of theatregoers at a decisive moment in history, at the end of the Cold War, as the United States was attempting to renegotiate its role as the number one player in the imperialist sweepstakes. More brazenly than any other recent play, Angels—not unlike Wagner’s Ring—takes on questions of national mission and identity. It also attempts to interrogate the various mythologies—from Mormonism to multiculturalism to neoconservatism—that have been fashioned to consolidate an American identity.

At the same time, the play is intent on emphasizing the crucial importance of the sexual and racial margins in defining this elusive identity. In this sense, it is clearly linked to the strategies of the activist movement, Queer Nation, whose founding in 1990 only narrowly postdated the writing of the play. This offshoot of the AIDS activist group ACT UP agitated for a broader and more radical social and cultural agenda. As Queer Nation did, Angels in America aims to subvert the distinction between the personal and the political, to refuse to be closeted, to undermine the category of the normal and to question the fixedness and stability of every sexual identity. Reimagining America, giving it a camp inflection, Angels announces: “We’re here. We’re queer. We’re fabulous. Get used to it!”

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January 11, 1994—Tony Kushner’s apartment, New York City

DS: How did you first get interested in theatre?

TK: My mother was a professional bassoonist, but when we moved down to Louisiana she didn’t have enough playing opportunities, so she channeled her creative energies into being an amateur actress. She was the local tragedienne and played Linda Loman and Anne Frank’s mother. She also played Anna O in A Far Country, her first play, and I had vivid homoerotic dreams about her being carried around by this hot young man who played Sigmund Freud—you can make all sorts of things about that!—and I have very strong memories of her power and the effect she had on people. I remember her very much in Death of a Salesman, everybody weeping at the end of the play. She was really very, very good in those parts. So I think it had something to do with being a mother-defined gay man [laughs] and an identification with her participation. And then there were other obvious things. I grew up very, very closeted and I’m sure that the disguise of theatre, the doubleness and all that slightly tawdry stuff, interested me. I acted a little bit when I was a kid but because most of the people who hung around the theatre in town were gay men, I was afraid of getting caught up in that. I had decided at a very early age that I would become heterosexual. So I became a debater instead. And then when I got to New York, I started seeing every play.

When was that?

1974. I arrived at a pretty great time. Broadway had not died completely. So you could still see some interesting Broadway-type shows: The Royal Family, Absurd Person Singular, things that were sort of trashy but really well done, with actors like Rosemary Harris and Larry Blyden. Musicals were already dead, but there was something that resembled excitement: Equus, Amadeus and all that shit, which I knew wasn’t good but at least had energy. And at the same time there was all this stuff going on downtown. I saw the last two performances of Richard Schechner’s Mother Courage and then I watched as the Performance Group disintegrated and became the Wooster Group. I saw Spalding Gray’s first performance pieces and Three Places in Rhode Island, Lee Breuer’s Animations and JoAnne Akalaitis’s Dressed Like an Egg. And I saw one piece by Foreman, I think it was Rhoda in Potatoland, but I didn’t understand it. It was the first piece of experimental theatre I’d ever seen and I was horrified and fascinated. My first real experience with Foreman was his Threepenny Opera, which I saw about ninety-five times and which is one of my great theatre experiences. When I was in college, I was beginning to read Marx. As a freshman, I had read Ernst Fischer’s Necessity of Art and was very upset and freaked out by it. The notion of the social responsibility of artists was very exciting and upsetting for me.

Why upsetting?

I arrived from Louisiana with fairly standard liberal politics. I was ardently Zionist and where I grew up, the enemy was still classic American anti-Semitism. It was a big shock to discover all these people on the left at Columbia who were critical of Israel. My father is very intelligent in politics but very much a child of the Krushchev era, the great disillusionment with Stalinism. I guess I just believed that Marxism was essentially totalitarianism and I could hear in Fischer, and then in Arnold Hauser, a notion of responsibility that is antithetical to the individualist ideology that I hadn’t yet started to question.

And there were two things that changed my understanding of theatre. One was reading Brecht. I saw Threepenny Opera in ’76 and thought it was the most exciting theatre I’d ever seen. It seemed to me to combine the extraordinary visual sense that I had seen downtown with a narrative theatre tradition that I felt more comfortable with. And there was also the amazing experience of the performance. When Brecht is done well, it is both a sensual delight and extremely unpleasant. And Foreman got that as almost nothing else I’ve ever seen. It was excoriating and you left singing the songs. So I read the “Short Organum” and Mother Courage—which I still think is the greatest play ever written—and began to get a sense of a politically engaged theatre. When I first came to Columbia I was very involved in trying to get amnesty for draft evaders, and I did a library sit-in in ’75, which was a big experience for me. It was the first successful political action I’d ever been involved in. And I met all these people from the Weather Underground who were still hanging out in Morningside Heights, and got very deeply into the mythology of radical politics. And in Brecht, I think I understood Marx for the first time. I understood materialism, the idea of the impact of the means of production, which in Brecht is an issue of theatrical production. I started to understand the way that labor is disappeared into the commodity form, the black magic of capitalism: the real forces operating in the world, the forces of the economy and commodity production that are underneath the apparent order of things.

Because of Brecht I started to think of a career in the theatre. It seemed the kind of thing one could do and still retain some dignity as a person engaged in society. I didn’t think that you could just be a theatre artist. That’s when I first read Benjamin’s Understanding Brecht and decided I wanted to do theatre. Before that I was going to become a medieval studies professor.

Why?

I loved the Middle Ages and I think there’s something very appealing about its art, literature and architecture, but I was slowly getting convinced that it was of no relevance to anything.

What about the Middle Ages? The connection between art and religion?

I have a fantastical, spiritual side. And when I got to Columbia, I was very impressionable. The first class I took was a course in expository writing taught by a graduate assistant who was getting her Ph.D. in Anglo-Saxon literature. So we did Beowulf. I found the magic and the darkness of it very appealing and I was very, very moved by—and I still am—being able to read something nine hundred years old, or two thousand years old in the case of the Greeks, and to realize that it isn’t in any way primitive. And you also realize—although I don’t believe in universal human truths—that there are certain human concerns that go as far back as Euripides or Aeschylus.

And of course Medieval art and culture predates the development of bourgeois individualism. . . .

Exactly.

Which you go to great pains to critique.

And it’s extraordinary to see that great richness can come from societies that aren’t individuated in that way. The anonymity of the art is terrifying to a modern person. It’s not until very late, really until the beginning of the Renaissance, that you start to have artists identifying themselves. You realize these human beings had a profoundly different sense of the social.

At the same time, I started to get very excited about Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. I directed Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair as my first production at Columbia, and it was horrible.

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It’s a very difficult play.

Yes, I know. I didn’t start easy—thirty-six parts. I couldn’t even find thirty-six actors. One of them didn’t speak English and we had to teach him syllabically. And you can’t understand most of it anyways because of the references to things that have long since disappeared. But I had fun doing it and decided at that point—although I’d tried writing a couple of things—that I would become a director, because I didn’t think that I’d ever write anything of significance. I was also attempting to follow in the footsteps of people I really admired, like Foreman, Akalaitis and Liz LeCompte. I thought that the best thing to do was to write the text as a director. And so I spent two years answering switchboards at a hotel and two years teaching at a school for gifted children in Louisiana. I directed several things there to get over my fear of directing, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I did my first take at The Baden-Baden Play for Learning, which I’m beginning to think is, next to Mother Courage, the best thing Brecht ever wrote. And then I applied to NYU graduate school in directing because I wanted to work with Carl Weber because he had worked with Brecht—and he looked like Brecht. And at my second attempt—George Wolfe and I just discovered that we were rejected by him in the same year—I got in.

You mention Bartholomew Fair, with its multiple plot lines, like your own work, and you also speak of the American narrative tradition with which your writing certainly is engaged.

I think it’s completely of that tradition.

What impact have Miller, Williams and O’Neill had on your writing?

Miller, none. I do actually admire Death of a Salesman. I think it really is kind of powerful. And I can see how, in its time, it had an immense impact. And it’s still hard to watch without sobbing at the end. But some of it is a cheat. It’s melodramatic and it has that awful, fifties ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Other TCG Books by David Savran:
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• The Haunted Stage
• Edward Albee
• Jon Robin Baitz
• Philip Kan Gotanda
• Holly Hughes
• Tony Kushner
• Terrence McNally
• Suzan-Lori Parks
• José Rivera
• Ntozake Shange
• Nicky Silver
• Anna Deavere Smith
• Paula Vogel
• Wendy Wasserstein
• Mac Wellman
• George C. Wolfe
• Copyright Page