John Lahr’s Tony Kushner profile in this week’s New Yorker isn’t available online, unfortunately — but this interview with Lahr provides a pretty good idea of his attitude toward Kushner’s work, and particularly toward Angels in America, which Lahr holds up as a modern American “masterpiece.”
After reading the Lahr profile, I found myself revisiting Daniel Mendelsohn’s NYRB review of the HBO production of Angels, which offers (to my admittedly biased mind) the most evenhanded look at the artistic strengths and weaknesses of Kushner’s magnum opus. Mendelsohn readily acknowledges the play’s many artistic high points, but he also notes:
. . . much of what seemed crucial about the play [in the early ’90s] seems artificial or even dated now . . . you realize how much the play depends on a cozy kind of politically correct goodwill and the easy prejudices of its audience, and so you realize, too, how often it makes its points not through dramatic logic or motivational coherence, but by means of emotional gimmicks and dramatic fudging.
I think this is right (though I should add that I’ve only seen Angels in the television medium, and presumably many of its weaknesses, particularly the stagey quality of much of the dialogue, would drop away were I to see it as it was originally produced). As Mendelsohn writes, Kushner’s plays has “the bones of a much grander and more important work” — but it never quite achieves greatness, not least because of Kushner’s tendency toward self-congratulation, and his inability to avoid stroking his own, and his audience’s, sense of moral superiority.
THE AGITPROP PROBLEM: This comes across most obviously, Mendelsohn points out, in the case of Joe Pitt, the play’s closeted Mormon Republican:
Indeed, of all the desertions that Angels depicts, none is as striking as the desertion of Joe by his creator. Angels presents many images of suffering . . . [but] each of these characters is, by the end of the play, healed, comforted, or forgiven . . . Of all the sufferers in Angels, only Joe is left alone at the end, the only character who is neither forgiven nor redeemed in a way that conforms to Kushner’s sense of “Perestroika” as a “comedy.”
Why is this? When you look over the cast of characters in Angels and think about whom we’re supposed to sympathize with, and who gets forgiven, you can’t help noticing that the most sympathetic, the “best” characters are either ill, or women, or black, or Jewish. Looking over this rather PC list, it occurs to you to wonder whether, in the worldview of this play’s creator, the reason why Joe Pitt, who alone of the characters is the most genuinely and interestingly torn, who in fact seeks love the hardest and suffers the most for self-knowledge, can’t be forgiven by his creator, and is the only character who goes unredeemed in some way at the end of the play, is that he’s a healthy, uninfected, white, Anglo-Saxon, male Christian. This in turn makes you realize how much of the second part of this play depends, from the in-joke of San Francisco as Heaven to the closing scene in which Prior addresses the audience and in a valedictory blessing vapidly declares us all to be “fabulous creatures, each and every one,” on a certain set of glib, feel-good, politically correct gay assumptions about the world, assumptions that in the end undercut the ambitions and, occasionally, the pretensions of what has come before . . .
It’s this inability not to pander to his audience (or to his own prejudices), I think, that leaves Kushner stuck halfway to true artistic greatness, unable to go the rest of the distance. You can see a similar limitation at work in Kushner’s election-time play-in-progress, in which Laura Bush confronts first the ghosts of dead Iraqi children and then, in another scene, Kushner himself. A bad left-wing playwright (Tim Robbins, anyone?) would have simply made the First Lady a cackling villain or a pathetic dupe, but Kushner is better than that — his Laura Bush is clever and witty and sharp and interesting, his Laura Bush quotes Shakespeare and Dostoevsky and is even allowed to get the better of Kushner, for a moment or two, in their face-off, and you can feel the character almost slipping away from Kushner, almost departing the stale agitprop routine he has devised and becoming someone real, someone full-fledged and interesting in spite of being white and Christian and Republican and all the rest of it . . . and then Kushner snaps her back into place, pulls the scene back into harness, and it ends with a monologue in which the actress Kirsten Johnson imagines the UN General Assembly (that great embodiment of suffering humanity, as we all know) rising up against Bush, “ablaze with Life’s revulsion at Death and at Death’s astounded, clueless little minion.”
Which is to say, it ends in polemic, in choir-preaching, and in the expression of ideas perfectly tailored to the prejudices of Kushner’s audiences (the Laura-Tony confrontation first played out at a MoveOn.org benefit). Which is where Angels in America ends, ultimately, with its one Republican, Middle American, Christian character abandoned and everyone else safely “fabulous.”
And which, I think, is where Kushner himself ends (at least in his work to date), trapped somewhere between Tim Robbins and Dostoevsky, his artistic aspirations tangled hopelessly in the nets of his politics.
— Ross
The Dish 