14 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE JULY 23, 1993

ENTERTAINMENT

Coming into an identity and changing bad habits

An interview with Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner

by Barry Daniels

Tony Kushner is a lively, intellectual, political, out, gay man who has recently achieved great success and a certain amount of notoriety for his epic drama, Angels in America, the first part of which, Millennium Approaches, opened on Broadway May 4.

Kushner was born in Manhattan in 1956, and was raised in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He majored in medieval studies as an undergraduate at Columbia University and completed an MFA in directing at New York University.

He was closeted throughout his school years, but has since come out and been active in the gay community. He has been arrested several times in ACT UP demonstrations and has used his current celebrity status to speak publicly on gay issues. His contract for the Broadway production of Angels in America specifies that one dollar from each ticket sold will be donated to groups that support AIDS research.

Kushner's first produced play, A Bright Room Called Day, was performed in New York in 1985, and revived at the Public Theatre in 1991. It enjoyed a successful run at the Eureka Theatre in San Francisco in 1987. It is a serious examination of the effect of the rise of Nazism on a group of political radicals in Berlin during the 1930s.

Kushner's free adaptation of Pierre Corneille's baroque drama, L'Illusion comique, was originally performed at the New York Theatre Workshop in 1988, and then revised and expanded for a production directed by Mark Lamos at the Hartford Stage in 1990. It is an extravagant and theatrical piece of writing, a kind of poetic

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meditation on love, theater, and the imagination that has as much Kushner as Corneille in it. It has been widely produced in the regional theater, and Universal Studios has commissioned Kushner to make a screen adaptation of it.

Angels in America was commissioned by the Eureka Theatre and director Oscar Eustis in 1987. From its first workshop production in Los Angeles in May 1990, it has been heralded as a major event in the theater. Subtitled "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes," it is a seven hour mini-epic for eight actors in two parts, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika. The Royal National Theatre production of Millennium Approaches in January 1992 was lavishly praised and received the London Drama Critics Award for Best New Play. Both parts of Angels in America opened at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in November 1992.

The decision to open the play on Broadway followed positive critical response to the L.A. production, although Perestroika required revisions that have delayed its Broadway opening until the fall. By the time Millennium Approaches opened on Broadway it had received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It recently won the Tony Award for Best Play of the current season.

Barry Daniels: At present, I'm seeing a lot of paradoxes in the politics of the gay community. You've alluded to them in Angels in America and in your interviews. We could start with the most current one concerning gays in the military.

Tony Kushner: It's a very problematic

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and complicated issue. It sort of demarcates the line between evolutionary and revolutionary politics. I think there is a way in which, if one accepts that our best hopes as a community within the larger community of America is to gain access to civil rights and to instate the legitimate formality protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, being able to serve in the military is a critical step in that regard. It is a short-cut over a decade of struggling for recognition. If the government says that, within the confines of federal administrative jurisdiction, gays and lesbians are recognized as legitimate . . . it would give you

access to an ar-

more

Tony Kushner

gument that would have great power in court. On a radical level, obviously the United States Army is not such a great thing. Nobody who really believes in human progress believes that they're ever going to do much that is very good. So it's a complicated situation. I would like to see the community adopt a very sophisticated stance towards it.

You talked about the concept of community both as isolated groups working together or the concept of multiculturalism or interculturalism.

I do think it's part of a process of coming into an identity that a certain kind of tribalism or nationalism develops. You need to be able to mediate between a variety of positions that are tenable but none of which are exclusively the answer. And I think that in terms of nationalism, creating a gay and lesbian identity is definitely on the agenda. That is, to a certain extent, the process of defining oneself in distinction from the other and the other, at this point, is a variety of things. But I think, at the same time we want to define our community, we also shouldn't become a nation-state, a nineteenth century nation-state with fixed boundaries.

You used the words "in distinction from" rather than in opposition to, which is a position I'm in favor of.

The right is the group that always sees the other as the enemy. The other is not the enemy. The other is the back part of what you are, to the extent that you are defined in distinction from the other. Recognizing difference, and celebrating difference, and honoring difference, and being curious about it, and exploratory about it are the good things. Demonizing it, and being afraid of it, and being sort of flat-head stupid about it are the bad things... We don't have majority strength in voting, and I believe in a democracy in voting. We need to form alliances. If we don't make those alliances we're going to be sunk.

In a

a way your play being on Broadway opens it to a broader community. It's very empowering to see so many affluent gay couples mixed in with everything else.

What I love is watching the straight people that come on Wednesday matinees. And all the blue-haired ladies from Westchester that come and sit through it and then stand up at the end. About the hype, I don't know. At first I was kind of horrified by it. Now I'm kind of excited by it.

One might say that in the Year of the Queer, you're the Queer of the Year.

Exactly. That's what you really have to see it as. It's certainly not something I've really gone out and courted. It's a manifestation of a much larger cultural transformation that this play happens to coincide with and is, to a certain extent, an expression of. One concern with all the media atten-

tion the gay community has had from the election forward is to what extent is it simply a fad, a kind of homo-chic.

I don't think it's a fad at all. I think there will be-of course, I mean there already is now-dabbling in sexual ambiguity is the straight world's homo chic. I honestly don't believe that it's a fad. I believe that it's a much more serious thing than that. I think that there will be a backlash which may make it seem even more like a fad, because we'll say, "Oh well, so we're over that." But, in fact, what it is is simply a backlash. There's going to be a time when everybody says enough already. It's already here.

When the article in Time about the play is called "The Gay White Way," you can already hear a certain amount of anxiety. Where will this lead? And when will this stop? And what's the future of the human race, if everybody turns queer? It's not said in the article that way, but that's basically what I think is vibrating under the surface. You really have to be ready for that, because it will come.

The significant thing is that, when all this is over and done, we'll be many, many millions of miles away from home base. But we will have, I think, punched through the next layer, in the way Stonewall punched through the first one. We'll be a force to contend with as we've never been before. In the play and in some of your interviews you seem to say you advocate a "neo-Hegelian positivism."

Louis [in the play] says that, talking about the constant progress forward.

He also has the speech about the pyramid model of government that originally vested power at the top. You've stated that you believe that if power can shift down to the numerous oppressed groups of which the gay and lesbian community is only one-if those groups can unify and assume the power, that you are optimistic about the future.

I think Louis' argument is something you have to take both very seriously and also question very heavily, because it's coming from a complicated place... Historians of the [American] Revolution and the Constitution have made the point, that the balancing act at the creation of the Federalist government allows for a radical dissemination of power that was never envisaged by the gentleman farmers who put the whole thing together. I do believe that if this country has a positive destiny, that destiny is for power to shift downward and outward. . . Americans really don't like fascists. I do think that freedom, whatever that is, is something that this country values.

Guilt is an important element in Angels in America. I'm thinking of Joe and Louis. It's very clear and very understandable with Louis, but the guilt in Joe is associated with religion. I read that in the second part, Perestroika, you take a very negative attitude towards him. He's one of those dual-natured characters. His