QUICK RESPONSE: Tony Kushner play gets world premiere in Minneapolis

CP: The long wait is over. The long play has opened (tonight, 5/22/09).

RP: Tony Kushner's "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures" has finally premiered at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Whew. It's huge, sprawling, a marathon of a comic drama.

CP: Though the run time is 3 1/2 hours with two intermissions, I found myself pretty absorbed by most of it. I have seen it twice now, and both times my energy and attention dragged in the third act. You?

RP: Ditto. I found myself engaged for the first two acts. But it then it began to dawdle. And I kept waiting for it to become, well, anthemic, in the way that only Kushner can, with big ideas and modern, fearless characters speaking out of their raw needs.

CP: I agree there, that it was, well, non-anthemic. To me, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

RP: If "The Intelligent Homosexual" seems less than I expected, it's because Tony Kushner has set the bar very high for himself. With "Angels in America" and "Caroline, or Change," two of his most formidable works in the contemporary canon, he not only tells gripping stories but he does so in a way that pushes the field of theater forward. That's why "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide" is so surprising. For all its intellectual blather, its complex couplings and its radical labor history, it seems, so, well, ordinary.

CP: The plot centers on the Marcantonios of Brooklyn, N.Y. It's set at a family reunion in 2007, when patriarch Gus (Michael Cristofer) is 75 and a widower. His sister is there, played by the estimable Kathleen Chalfant, and his three children. Plus a gay son-in-law, a pregnant lesbian sister-in-law, his daughter's ex-husband. And a few more. There are 11 cast members. When you say ordinary, I know what you mean, as it doesn't have Mormons, fever dreams, angels busting through ceilings, or Ray Cohn dying of AIDS with an ex-drag queen nurse.

RP: I admire Kushner's ability to intertwine big ideas and people seamlessly. Here, it's that the patriarch of the family, a walking encyclopedia of left labor history, feels like he has early Alzheimer's. So, he wants to short-circuit the disease. He has already tried suicide once, and failed. There's also the story of love and wants of his children and their significant others and partners. That's what you call a family conference today.

CP: The adult children have come together at a big brownstone in Brooklyn that's been in the family for several generations and may now be worth $4 million. It even has a dusty suitcase secreted behind a living-room wall. Gus wants to sell the place, off himself, and let the money from the house sale go to his offspring and their altogether effed-up lives. There's high-school teacher Pill, who has been with Paul, a theologian, for 26 years but is paying for sex on the side with a Yale-educated hustler named Eli (Michael Esper). That is one long-in-tooth rent boy. A lot of stage time goes to Pill (a sort of Kushner stand-in, I thought) and his feelings for his partner and the hustler. Much of it pretty believable in a gay world where constancy is not necessarily valued or expected as much as in heterosexual culture.

RP: Kushner knows how to push buttons. And he does so expertly. I found the characters (and characterizations) interesting. The challenge for Kushner (and the audience) is that his ideas overload the narrative. I don't want to say that "The Intelligent Homosexual" twaddles on like a beast of burden but after awhile, you feel the full length of the show's run time.

CP: There's something amazing that has happened here, in the combo of acting talent, Kushner brainpower and the Guthrie's production values. I think Kushner has deliberately sought to write something less pathbreaking than "Angels," perhaps more of a classic American play. One cannot help but see the imprint on this play of Miller, Shaw, O'Neill, Williams and Tracy Letts, whose "August; Osage County" was a recent Tony-winning drama about a large family reunion full of fights and dysfunction and pathos in a multi-leveled house.

RP: Very much so. The scale was monumental -- with Mark Wendland's huge, three-tier, cityscape set recalling the scale of, say, Miller's "A View from the Bridge." But this play felt a little sitcom-like also, not in compression but in the comic timing. For example, there is a lot of vocal overlay. I suppose it's true to life to six or eight people all talking at once. But, one, it's a comedic bit. Do you think that "The Intelligent Homosexual" became too cute and funny?

CP: Cute? No. The opening-night audience I thought responded pretty robustly to the generous amount of humor in the play, especially in the first and second acts. There are many great laugh lines in this show.

RP: Considering that Kushner was working on this play up to the last minute, I'm impressed by the acting company. Charity Jones, who plays Maeve, the heavily pregnant partner of Gus' daughter, Empty (Linda Emond), was the intellectual equivalent of an auctioneer. I loved her fast-talking theoretical disquisitions. If there's some tentativeness in some of the performances, I'm not sure if it's because of Michael Greif's direction or the revisions up to opening. At one point, Kathleen Chalfant sits on the floor swami style, talking to her niece. The scene is a work of still-life, which would be fine in a gallery. Did it feel that way to you?

CP: I love Chalfant as an actor, but her character here is one of the least appealing. She's an ex-Maoist, a non-believing Catholic, someone capable of expounding cluelessly on the divinity of the poor while everyone is racing to get Maeve to the hospital delivery room -- it's like she's the opposite of anything. And she is entirely non-humorous as well. Sort of a deadly combo. I agree about Jones. Cristofer is strong as the patriarch, Stephen Spinella is very spry and amusing as the neurotic Pill....

RP: It was interesting to see Michelle O'Neill as a merchant of death here. All in all, I agree with the brilliant out-of-town director who said: "Only Tony Kushner gets to use the Guthrie as a workshop."

CP: So how do foresee this play's future? Broadway biggie?

RP: Well, it needs some work, cutting from three acts to two and condensing the narrative. I also think that he can lose a lot of the labor history and gain a much more potent play. It's a great effort but it's a first draft. And you?

CP: Knowing how much change "Angels" went through from opening to final form, I think this play will go on to find a solid spot in the Kushner canon.

Rohan Preston 612-673-4390 Claude Peck • 612-673-7977