Plot outline emerges for Kushner's newest work

The play, to premiere next month at the Guthrie, revolves around a complicated web of family relationships.

By CLAUDE PECK, Star Tribune

Last update: April 25, 2009 - 6:48 PM

Theater fans are naturally curious about the world premiere Tony Kushner play coming to the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in mid-May. What is it about, they wonder. Mormons? AIDS? Angels? The Taliban?

A plot summary released by the Guthrie Friday reveals that the play is structured around a "most unusual" family reunion. In 2007, a family patriarch named Gus Marcantonio (Michael Cristofer), invites his sister and three children to a get-together in a brownstone in Brooklyn.

Rumors that the play might involve real or threatened suicide are perhaps supported by the father's name, which clearly plays on the Roman general Marcus Antonius, a friend of Caesar's who is said to have taken his own life.

In Kushner's long-titled play, Marcantonio is a retired longshoreman and "20th-century thinker" who is having trouble relating to events of the 21st century. The narrative is said to examine family relationships, marriage and ideology, and the threat to all when connections are lost.

The Marcantonio family includes Gus's sister, Bennie (Kathleen Chalfant). Gus has a daughter, Empty (Linda Emond), and two sons, Vito (Ron Menzel) and Pill (Stephen Spinella). It appears that two of his offspring are gay, as the cast includes Charity Jones as Empty's lover, Maeve, and Michael Potts as Pill's husband, Paul.

To keep the complications going, Empty has an ex-husband played by Mark Benninghofen and Pill has a lover played by Michael Esper.

"The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures" opens in previews on May 15. The run officially opens May 22 and runs through June 28.

Claude Peck • 612-673-7977