Theater review: Seeking purpose in life and death in 'The Intelligent Homosexual'

"The only real death is to live a meaningless life," says Gus Marcantonio, a tough-minded bird who once hoisted crates with his hands and walked picket lines on the dock. "You're only human if you have work to do."

Now retired and bored to the point of translating Latin during his empty days, Gus reasons suicide is a mere formality. His three children demur, and in that conflict Tony Kushner searches for his play, "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures," which had its world premiere Friday at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.

Director Michael Greif has given Kushner a good look at what he's written. The lines sound great in the actors' mouths, their performances are excellent and Greif dances this show across the Guthrie stage with humor and muscular strokes -- fighting the script's occasional exhausted ennui. Now the playwright can set his hands to clarifying his irresolute intentions, for Kushner has not yet discovered his own purpose in writing this play.

It is a very American work -- a dense rush of ideas and diatribes about the working man, wealth, spiritual unease and meaningful purpose. Gus finds his exaltation in union wages and justice rather than sales commissions, but he lives only a subway ride away from Willy Loman.

The similarity, however, points up an important distinction. Arthur Miller and his American realist cohorts -- Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill for example -- used dialogue as a scalpel to cut their characters open. Kushner's strength always has been proclamation -- bold and at times preachy in its ambition, epic in its spectacle and sprawl. In this milieu, his operatic cacophony at times skates precipitously close to the razor's edge of incoherence. The wash of recitative becomes more of an irritant than a revelatory acid.

Why die now?

Michael Cristofer embodies the tough heroism of Gus, whose passion for the union movement still sizzles. Ironically, this vigorous voice is telling his family, gathered at his Brooklyn brownstone, that he wants to end it all, claiming he has incipient Alzheimer's.

He wishes.

Forgetting would be preferable to remembering that he once led a useful life. He has been burning old union and family papers to expunge his memory, and perhaps to salve a conscience scarred by compromises he made as a firebrand labor organizer.

The Alzheimer's red herring exemplifies the problem with Gus and the play. Kushner doesn't have a compelling argument for this cataclysmic decision -- other than Gus's peroration that in an earlier suicide attempt he felt an astonishing potency, as if death were the ultimate orgasm. Prosaic and profound, yes, but Camus would have slapped Gus and told him to quit feeling sorry for himself.

Kushner dresses the three children in various costumes of dysfunction. Linda Emond's Maria Teresa (M.T.), a labor lawyer and Gus' middle child, provides whatever heart exists. She has her issues -- such as a tryst with her ex-husband (Mark Benninghofen), who is living in the brownstone's basement, while her lesbian partner, Maeve (Charity Jones), is pregnant. The father is M.T.'s brother, Vito (Ron Menzel), a bristling and volcanic font of testosterone-infused anger.

The third child is Pill (Stephen Spinella), who borrowed $30,000 from M.T., spent it on a prostitute (Michael Esper) and now wants his husband, Paul (Michael Potts), to consider a three-way arrangement. Pill seems a vestige of "Angels in America," a confused lover who, if we wish to be generous, is adrift in life. More soberly, his dissolute self-pity wrecks the lives around him.

In Benedicta, Gus' sister, Kathleen Chalfant embodies the spiritual guide of this story with a cool and honest rationalism. It is she who understands the turmoil and she who puts the burden of responsibility on Emond's M.T., to confront and stay with her father through his decision.

That moment comes -- perhaps the closest we get to heartbreak in his play -- with Cristofer and Emond striking the hot surface of their emotions with sizzling immediacy.

Otherwise, we are left intrigued and impressed by the stagecraft and Kushner's intellectual heft. That seems a slight response to the ultimate philosophical question -- to be or not to be.

Graydon Royce • 612-673-7299