Kushner Exhorts Need for Artistic Risks

When Tony Kushner, author of Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America, spoke at the Loeb Mainstage last Thursday, he compared the necessity of risk-taking in theater to the experience of a student in a seminar.

“You have to raise your hand and say the thing that marks you as this semester’s asshole,” he said.

Later, he added, “There’s so much in the world that’s frightening and bad. What a wimp you are if you’re beaten by drama critics.”

Kushner’s visit was the latest installment of the Learning From Performers series, co-sponsored by the Office for the Arts at Harvard, the American Repertory Theatre (ART), and the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club. The event is designed to be informal; the goal of the series is to facilitate a conversation, not hold a lecture.

The playwright spoke for just over an hour, answering questions first from the event’s host, Gideon Lester of the ART, and then from the audience. The questions ranged from politics (one of Kushner’s latest theatrical inventions is a conversation with Laura Bush) to books (Kant, Benjamin and Dostoyevsky are indispensable to him) to playwriting.

Kushner’s distinction between theater and journalism is that while journalism necessarily always drives at a particular point, or expounds a certain idea, a good play refuses to set things down in so many words. A good play, he says, is not a set of arguments.

So Angels is not something that can be boiled down to a statement, or even to the written page at all. Taken in its entirety, it’s an effect, and crucial to that effect, Kushner insists, is the performance given on the stage.

Because no two performances are the same, the same play never has quite the same effects. Paradoxically, a good play is difficult to capture in words because, as Kushner says, it is constantly growing and changing; it’s as organic as, say, a human being.

If it is hard to approach the body of ideas in Angels through journalistic writing, it is equally hard to approach an understanding of its author through hearing him talk. At the Loeb, Kushner spoke with warmth and wit. But what he conveyed was merely the things he represents—powerful playwriting, political indignation and activism, his own brand of humor—and not necessarily what he actually is.

The real Tony Kushner is not the static figure of an hour’s public conversation; he is himself changing, constantly acting and being acted upon. The living, breathing Tony Kushner—a self-described “gay American Jewish Socialist”—wouldn’t fit into a magazine article.

And yet there is something undeniably appealing about hearing a playwright speak for himself. What, you wonder, will he even sound like? The two-part Angels in America, which arrived on Broadway in 1993, is explosive theater; it belongs in the category of plays Kushner calls “huge sloppy messes.”

Kushner himself, however, is remarkably contained; he is thin and demure behind wiry, scholarly glasses. He keeps his hands clasped when not talking, though they float up in superfluous gestures when he is. His speaking does not erupt in the same way as his characters’ speech.

His particular wit lies in his ability to add an unexpected bite to seemingly ordinary statements, usually in the form of a kicker. His parents, he says, were “neurotic—which is to say [they gave me] a personality.”

On President Bush, whom he sees as plunging down the conservative trail blazed by Ronald Reagan two decades ago: “He’s not the founder of something really terrible like Reagan is. He’s like the next degraded installment—like AOL 9.2.”

The problem Kushner has with plays driven by single ideas—a kind of expository theater—is that they don’t get us anywhere. The playwright first hits upon some important idea, then “turns it into a club and beats you over the head with it.”

“I’ve seen a lot of gay theater the point of which is, ‘It’s bad to be mean to gay people,’” he says. “I know this. Most people know this.”

To truly affect the way people think and make sense of their lives, the playwright needs to find a new starting point, and it may not be one he himself is comfortable with. “You want to start at the point of confusion,” says Kushner, “and go forward.”

Even the playwright must keep in mind that the theater is living and has a potential all its own to grow. “You don’t want to start out trying to teach people something you already know,” Kushner says to an aspiring playwright in the audience who asks him for advice, “They know what you know; now where can you go together with them?”