A Playwright Spreads His Wings : Tony Kushner calls his epic examination of Reagan-era ethics ‘A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,’ but ‘Angels in America’ is not just another AIDS play

Four years ago, when Tony Kushner began to write “Angels in America,” he was a relatively unknown playwright attempting to address “some of the issues I felt about being gay in America at the time.”

It was a modest, if timely, ambition, and given Kushner’s brief resume one might have expected similarly modest results. His only previously produced work, “A Bright Room Called Day,” a drama about Weimar Germany, had received a single professional production--a run at London’s Bush Theatre that the playwright called “a catastrophe.”

That “Angels in America” opens next Sunday at the Mark Taper Forum as possibly the most anticipated play of the year, and its 36-year-old author regarded as the most talented American dramatist since David Mamet, is testimony to Kushner’s immodest vision.

The play--in two parts, “Millennium Approaches” and “Perestroika,” which will be performed in repertory through Nov. 29--is a seven-hour examination of Reagan-era ethics that addresses such diverse topics as AIDS, Mormonism and the fall of communism. Already critics have hailed it as a significant step beyond the usual kitchen-sink concerns of much contemporary American drama.

During a sold-out run of the play’s first half in London last season, Michael Billington, theater critic of the Guardian, wrote that “unlike most American dramatists, (Kushner) is unafraid to link private and public worlds . . . (“Millennium Approaches”) is a play of epic energy that gets American drama not just out of the closet but, thank God, out of the living room as well.”

Frank Rich, the New York Times’ theater critic, called the same production “a radical rethinking of the whole aesthetic of American political drama.”

At first reading, “Angels in America” is a complex, and complicated, interweaving of wildly divergent protagonists, real and imagined--a homosexual couple, a married couple, the infamous New York defense attorney Roy Cohn, the ghost of convicted Cold War traitor Ethel Rosenberg, and Mr. Lies, a travel agent who just might be the product of a Valium-induced hallucination. Also making an appearance are the angels alluded to in the title, who lend an apocalyptic tone to the play’s otherwise unholy alliances.

But on a deeper level, Kushner’s work, which is subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” is a clear-eyed, insightful examination of the political, social and moral forces shaping America during the latter half of the 20th Century--namely the decline of communism and the rising political power of the gay movement, two events that demonstrate what the playwright has called “the end of containment as ideology.”

Indeed, to label “Angels in America” an AIDS play is to miss Kushner’s larger, more ambitious concerns. Coming seven years after Larry Kramer’s seminal drama “The Normal Heart” and William Hoffman’s “As Is,” “Angels” is a second- or even third-generation play about America’s gay community. But if Kushner’s lens is an overtly homosexual one, the landscape that he examines belongs to all Americans.

“It’s not exactly about the fall of the right,” says Kushner, seated in one of the Taper’s rehearsal rooms a few weeks prior to his play’s opening. “But to a certain extent it is about the end of a particular kind of political evil, one that is completely hegemonic.”

Dissimilar to Germany’s Weimar Republic, which he addressed in “A Bright Room Called Day,” Kushner examines the United States in the late ‘80s and finds key differences between the American and European political sensibility.

“By 1986, ( perestroika ) had begun to happen and that would transform our political landscape. You don’t want to be stupidly optimistic about it, and I have a great temptation that way. But it was like this miracle happened.

“I like Americans,” Kushner continues. “I think there is something very impressive about us. It’s not a country that treats its minorities particularly well, and I don’t want to say that there aren’t closed minds here, but I think you can say historically that in America, as opposed to certain segments of Europe, we don’t leap to a fascistic solution. We had the option to in the ‘30s and we have Ross Perot now. But if there is anything great about this country, it is that it has not opted for fascism.

“Of course,” he adds, with a slightly apologetic smile, “it is never that simple.”

Not that anyone would ever accuse Kushner of being simple. Despite a slightly owlish demeanor and bland, Gap-style wardrobe--gray T-shirt, black jeans, gray cotton cardigan--the playwright retains an aggressive, lawyer-like intelligence that reflects his years as the star of his high school debate team. “I was this incredibly obnoxious debater, now I’m just incredibly obnoxious,” he says with a flash of his self-deprecating wit.

Although he was born in New York City and currently lives in Brooklyn, Kushner was raised in Lake Charles, La., the middle of three children born to two classical musicians who had met at the New Orleans Philharmonic. It was a highly literate, culturally sophisticated and politically aware household, an ideal environment in which Kushner--white, Jewish, gay and coming of age in the South during the turbulent ‘60s--developed both a healthy respect and skepticism for the idea of community, a conceit that would come to earmark his work as a dramatist.

“One of the things I wanted to explore was the legitimacy of the notion of community,” Kushner says. “It is a fundamental American question because that’s what this country is: a community comprised of not only different (constituencies) but hostile ones--and irreconcilably so.”

For Kushner, who has been open about his sexual preferences since his postgraduate days at New York University, the nation’s gay and lesbian community is not only one with which he is intimately familiar, but it serves as an exceptionally apt metaphor for his examination of America as a whole. “Because the demarcation line is sexual preference, the homosexual community is also a very disparate group of people of all races, cultures and political persuasions,” says Kushner. “It is synthetic and artificial.”

Within these cobbled communities, Kushner ponders man’s proclivity for both xenophobia and compassion. As he writes in “Millennium Approaches”: “AIDS shows the limits of tolerance . . . (and that) underneath tolerance is intense, passionate hatred.”

“I think that one wants to demonize and other-ize because it makes the world more manageable,” Kushner says. “The whole struggle in American culture now--multiculturalism, difference and inclusion--is really about breaking down those barriers between people, but in a smart sophisticated way. Not by saying, ‘We’re all white people with different-colored skins,’ but by acknowledging and celebrating and exploring the dynamics of that difference.”

And that, says Kushner, “is a different political outlook than containment, which is the Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain, the idea of an Evil Empire.”

It is also a different thematic attitude than what Kushner exhibited in “A Bright Room Called Day”--written after his graduation while he worked as a hotel switchboard operator--in which he somewhat pessimistically explored the failure of the left “when confronted with a triumphant right.” Written essentially as a formal experiment and something of a response to “Fear and Misery in the Third Reich” by Bertolt Brecht (Kushner’s self-described “idol”), as well as President Reagan’s controversial 1985 visit to Bitberg, the play tracked what Kushner describes as “a group of leftists in Germany in 1932, the friendship of which disintegrates as Hitler comes to power.”

The reasons? “There is no simple answer,” he says. “Failure of ideology, terror” and most significantly, “the idea that progressive people, in my opinion, are deeper and more sensitive than people on the right and consequently they are more conflicted.”

Although “A Bright Room Called Day” was produced by the New York Theater Workshop after its London run, the play was largely dismissed by critics as agitprop. Kushner concedes his play’s weaknesses. “Instead of leaving the whole thing implicit,” he says, “I stuck in this character--a performance-artist type--who overtly draws the parallel between Hitler and Reagan and that freaked some people out.”

One of the people decidedly not alarmed by Kushner’s dramaturgical excesses was Oskar Eustis, who was then dramaturge of San Francisco’s Eureka Theater and is now a resident director at the Taper. After seeing an earlier workshop production of the play, Eustis produced “Bright Room” at the Eureka, where it had its first successful run. Eustis is co-directing the Taper production of “Angels” along with Tony Taccone, who is former artistic director of the Eureka Theater.

“ ‘Bright Room’ just knocked me out,” recalls Eustis, who like many critics, considers Kushner “closer to the best of contemporary British writers like Caryl Churchill, David Hare and Howard Brenton. Tony has a combination of political, intellectual and true poetic vision that is unique among American writers.” Kushner, Eustis decided, was the perfect dramatist to write a play about the impact of AIDS on San Francisco’s gay community--the play that would become “Angels in America.”

For Kushner, who had been disturbed by the “homophobic reaction” to Roy Cohn’s AIDS-related death and had decided to write a play about that, Eustis’ offer was oddly prescient. “It seemed perfect since I had never written a gay play or one set in modern times and it was San Francisco and in the middle of the Reagan Administration.”

They applied for a special National Endowment for the Arts grant, certain that they would be rejected given the conservative political climate in 1987. They weren’t. One of the $57,000 grant’s stipulations was that the play be written for the Eureka’s acting company--a condition that forced Kushner to add women’s roles to his “play written for five gay men.”

Although Kushner went back to the drawing board, the result, a vastly expanded canvas that the playwright considers “firmly within the Western text-centered tradition,” is dramaturgically a leap ahead of “Bright Room.” Indeed, ever since it first played at the Taper, Too as a work-in-progress in 1990, “Millennium” has been eliciting strong critical and public response. It subsequently premiered at the Eureka Theater in 1991, prior to its move to the National Theater in London last season. Its arrival at the Taper next week--in association with the New York Shakespeare Festival--represents the first time the play has been staged in its entirety. (“Perestroika” was staged in a workshop production at the Taper earlier this year.)

Eustis suggests that Kushner “cracked the idea of dramatic action.” He also adds that Kushner “also took a deep breath and wrote about what was closest and scariest to him and that unleashed a complexity that is representative of our own lives.”

“ ‘Angels’ is about pairs of people,” says Kushner, who describes his original story line “as sort of inchoate--Roy Cohn, a person with AIDS, a troubled Jewish clerk and a Mormon.”

“In ‘Millennium Approaches,’ the couples are drawn so that they make overt sense,” he continues. “Republicans are with Republicans, Mormons are with Mormons, gays are with gays and straights are with straights. It is all neatly set up, but then it doesn’t work because of all sorts of internal stresses: The Mormon who is married is also gay, and one of the gay couple has AIDS and the other one can’t deal with it. So within that seemingly homogenous unit there is enormous conflict and potential for eruption.”

Which brings Kushner to Part II, “Perestroika,” in which he takes his cue from Gorbachev’s seminal announcement in the summer of 1988 “to show the couples regrouping in preposterous but productive alliances, that may be short-lived and unstable, but catalytic of change.”

That change, Kushner says, mirrors larger social shifts now occurring in the nation’s landscape--namely the resurgence of liberalism, the growing political clout of the gay movement and the possible decline of the conservative right.

“Bush could still win, but that nightmare of the Republican Convention I think actually did a great service--showing the ugliness of homophobia on national television,” Kushner says. “I don’t think most people buy it anymore. Nor is it evidence that we are being defeated, but rather that we are making incredible progress.”

Kushner in person voices controversial political views--the Reagan and Bush administrations, he says, “have killed people with their AIDS policies, like the Catholic Church has killed people--teen-agers--with their AIDS policies.” But Eustis says that “Angels in America” is not an exercise in easy polemics. Rather, the director believes, it is a meditative, deeply felt examination “at how people change, and how historically it is necessary that people change. There is an American idealism at the basis of Tony’s work.”

Indeed, one of play’s main themes--played out as dialectic between Judaism and Mormonism--is an examination “of how theoretical religion exists in a pluralistic society,” as one character puts it in “Perestroika.”

“One of the things that the play is saying is that (religious) theory is incredibly important to us and that without it, we don’t know where we are going,” Kushner says. “On the other hand, as systematic approaches to ethics age, get passed up by history, the rules and laws which they hand down become irrelevant and impossible and we distort ourselves terribly trying to adhere to those beliefs. It is a life-and-death matter to hang on to your beliefs, but it can also be a life-and-death matter to know when it’s time to say they aren’t working anymore.

“There is a distinction made in the play that I hope is there--between moralism and morality and the task is to find what is moral through what is moralist,” adds Kushner, who considers himself an agnostic--albeit one who concedes “it seems fairly impoverished to say that only matter and the laws that govern matter exist.”

Kushner credits much of his interest in religion to his family background as part of the little known but thriving Jewish community in Louisiana. “It wasn’t a great place to grow up gay,” he says, “but the Jewish community was large.” He attended a local Episcopal day school, “because it was the best elementary school in Lake Charles,” where his interest in theater first sprouted in a love of high church ritual.

Indeed, Kushner’s Southern childhood provided him with several unique and contrasting points of view--religious, cultural, social--that would come to bear on his work as a playwright. “In many ways, it was a great place to grow up,” he says, launching into a particularly lyrical description of southern Louisiana, “where the Great Plains fall into the ocean and it is steamy and tropical and beautiful.” It was also Cajun country, “not white, Southern Baptist, Klan territory,” he explains. “And the French-Canadian Catholics are a much more fun bunch of people.”

Although his parents were both professional musicians working in New York--his father was a Juilliard-trained clarinetist and his mother was the first bassoonist at the New York City Opera--the family moved to Lake Charles when Kushner was 2 years old after his father, a Louisiana native, inherited the family lumber business. Both parents continued their musical pursuits and the Kushner family home, located on the edge of a swamp, was a culturally rich one.

While Kushner, as well as his older sister and younger brother, was encouraged to follow artistic pursuits at home, he found the local high school, which had no theater department but a crack debate team, a micro-education in the civil rights movement.

“Certainly there were horrible crackers in my high school,” Kushner says. “But the South was also integrated in the ‘60s when the North wasn’t, and I went to a school that was 50% black and 50% white.”

He was a top student, and the leading member on the debate team, but he was also gay, a fact that he says “I’ve known as long as I can remember.” As a result, much of his school years were lonely, closeted ones. “I know there were other gays at my high school, but we never made contact,” he says. “I might have been one of those extraordinary people who got beat up for wearing earrings. But I wasn’t that genuinely radical a person. It was 1972 in Lake Charles, La., and without parental support there wasn’t a whole lot I could have done differently.”

In fact, any support he received was decidedly toward assimilation. “My father had figured it out and he was upset,” says Kushner. “He wasn’t a monster about it, but he wanted me to be straight and I wanted him to love me. I also didn’t want to hurt my mother and I wanted to have a family.”

So Kushner entered psychoanalysis in an attempt to become a heterosexual. It was a futile but not short-lived experiment. He spent his entire undergraduate years at New York’s Columbia University in analysis “with a wonderful straight male analyst who started out by saying ‘People’s sexual orientation doesn’t change under analysis.’ ”

It took four years of analysis and another three years hiding his sexuality before Kushner, like one of the characters in “Angels in America,” was able to call his mother from a pay phone to tell her he was gay.

Today, Kushner clearly relishes the personal and professional freedom he has gained from that decision. “I have no problems being called a gay playwright,” says Kushner, who was awarded a Whiting Foundation Award in 1990. “And I know straight people enjoy my work.”

And Kushner is in demand. After “Angels” completes its run at the Taper, it will open in New York at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in February. After that, Kushner will finish a screen version of his adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s “The Illusion” for Universal Studios and write a TV movie for PBS’ “American Playhouse” about the recent strike at the New York Daily News. Then, he will begin work on his next play.

“One of the things that I learned from being in the closet and then coming out is how much stronger and more fun life can be,” says Kushner, citing the writer, Hannah Arendt, and once again invoking his theme of community. “It is better to embrace your pariah-hood,” he says, “than to try and assimilate.”