THEATER : Happy? He’s Really, Really Trying : Tony Kushner has a Pulitzer and a few Tonys. He’s working on ‘Angels in America’ screenplays, and his adaptation of Brecht opens today in La Jolla. So why is success so difficult? Because that’s the kind of guy he is.

Prominently displayed in the foyer of playwright Tony Kushner’s sprawling new apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side is a striking work by Kukuli Valarde, a South Bronx artist. In a votive box, a masked figure of an Aztec woman stands flanked by angels with large phalluses; the subject is Malinche, an interpreter for the Spanish conquistadors. A delivery boy from Kushner’s local takeout had another interpretation.

“He thought it was a god,” Kushner says. “And, after looking around and observing to me that it appeared I was doing rather well, he wanted to know where he might get one.”

Indeed, the gods of prosperity appear to be smiling on the playwright who shot to fame on the wings of “Angels in America,” the seven-hour epic about gays, AIDS and Reaganism. “Angels” made Tony Award history last month, winning best play awards in two consecutive years for its two parts. The first, “Millennium Approaches,” opened on Broadway in spring, 1993, winning five Tonys, and “Perestroika,” in the fall of the same year, won three. “Millennium Approaches” also won Kushner the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for drama. The two shows are playing in repertory at Broadway’s Walter Kerr Theatre.

As “Angels” winds down its New York run before starting a national tour Sept. 25 in Chicago, Kushner is working on screenplays for the two films of “Angels” to be directed and co-produced by Robert Altman for New Line. In fact, that project caused Kushner to postpone the production of his 1985 play “The Heavenly Theatre,” once scheduled to open at the Taper next month.

Kushner couldn’t complete revisions on “Heavenly Theatre” in time for the Taper, but he did manage to finish a new adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s “Good Person of Setzuan” (also known in translation as “Good Woman of Setzuan”), which opens today at the La Jolla Playhouse. And this fall, his new play “Slavs,” based in part on material cut from “Perestroika,” will be presented Off Broadway.

As a result of all this, Kushner seems to have every right to exude success and well-being as he sits on a tasseled gold couch in his newly renovated library, his bearish figure draped in black, a small earring glittering on his left lobe. The earnings from “Angels” have made good his escape from Brooklyn, where he lived in a “shoe box” for the last 14 years, to this spacious apartment with views of the Hudson River near his alma mater, Columbia University. But a card Kushner recently received on his 38th birthday from George C. Wolfe, who directed “Angels” on Broadway, tells a different story.

Wolfe’s card, accompanying a gift, read: “From the Pulitzer to Prozac, for the man who has everything.” Prozac? For the person lauded as the leading playwright of his generation?

“Massive depression,” Kushner says with a gap-toothed, boyish grin and appealing shyness that belies his formidable reputation for lean, stilettoed writing and political discourse. “Well, not exactly ‘massively depressed,’ but I’m so phobic about writing that I was worried about the physical wear and tear of going through another summer like I did last summer. Writing doesn’t seem to be getting any easier. It’s getting harder, in fact.”

Last year’s “summer of hell” was brought on by the fact that he had to follow the tremendous hype and success of “Millennium Approaches” with a rewrite of “Perestroika.” His writing was so rushed under the desperate deadline that he says he is taking advantage of the impending national tour to do some structural revisions on “Perestroika.”

“I didn’t have a chance to enjoy any of the success of ‘Millennium Approaches,’ ” he recalls. “All I could think was, ‘They’re going to take it all away from me when they see how terrible “Perestroika” is,’ and I was terrified the production would be so bad it’d close both shows immediately. It got so bad that I started wondering, ‘If I kill myself, how long would it take to find the body?’ ”

Having spent most of the last year invoking kineahoras --Yiddish for the invocation to ward off divine retribution for good fortune--Kushner was given a prescription for a low dose of Prozac in the hope it would make him less anxious about writing.

“I’m a hideously undisciplined person, but Prozac, or the placebo effect of it, apparently worked,” he says, ticking off his relatively prolific achievements, which also include writing a number of magazine articles and a lecture tour of the Pacific Northwest. His national success with “Angels” has given him a platform not only to be a leading proponent of gay issues but also to raise the volume on leftist political discourse.

“I think I’ll always be a better playwright than a pundit,” he says, “but I believe that writers should be public intellectuals and that theater, even more than film, is a place of public debate. As much as I hate his movies, Oliver Stone has an aspiration I admire, and that is that he wants his art to be part of what makes and changes public policy and cultural practice. The playwrights I admire most--Brecht, Shaw, Ibsen, Shakespeare--part of what motivated them, too, was to be part of that debate. Theater was highly politicized then and I’d like to be in that tradition.”

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The opportunity to re-examine socialist tenets and ideals in the aftermath of the fall of Soviet-style communism was what motivated Kushner to write his new play, “Slavs,” set in Gorbachev’s Russia, as well as to accept the invitation of Lisa Peterson, La Jolla Playhouse’s associate artistic director, to provide a new translation of Brecht’s “The Good Person of Setzuan.”

German-born Brecht wrote the play between 1938 and 1940, while fleeing with his Jewish wife, Helene Weigel, from the Nazis. A Marxist, he eventually landed in Santa Monica during the war, returning to East Germany in 1949, after a stint in Zurich, to establish the famous Berliner Ensemble Theatre. Brecht is largely known in this country for his collaborations with composer Kurt Weill, including “Threepenny Opera.” But Brecht’s surreal, dark and satiric style is better displayed in his political plays like “Setzuan,” which will be directed at La Jolla by Peterson in a production featuring a cast of 12, including Charlayne Woodard and Lou Diamond Phillips.

Set in a mythical city caught between feudalism and industrialization, the drama follows the adventures of Shen Te (Woodard), whom the gods designate as the one completely moral person on Earth. Shen Te’s goodness, however, leads to disastrous consequences, and she has to masquerade as her cold and ruthless “male cousin” in order to correct her missteps. Further complicating the situation is a love affair that develops between her and an airman played by Phillips.

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With a multicultural cast and Latin rock rhythms provided by David Hildalgo and Louie Perez of the acclaimed rock group Los Lobos and the newly formed Latin Playboys, Peterson’s production seeks to draw contemporary parallels between the scrappy struggle for existence and social upheaval in “Setzuan” and the besieged border cities of Southern California. While Kushner’s translation faithfully focuses on Brecht’s Marxist analysis of the dog-eat-dog society, Peterson says that the work is also lively entertainment in the tradition of German political cabaret.

“My feeling was that there was probably a lot more variety in the play than had been rendered in previous American translations,” Peterson says. “Tony’s writing can be graphic, hip and harsh right up against someone speaking elegantly and almost archaically. He can be lyrical and also very funny in an almost Jewish vaudevillian way. While the content in ‘Setzuan’ is tough, it’s also very emotional. I thought Tony could be faithful to Brecht while lending the work an American and contemporary appeal.”

Kushner worked from literal English translations from the German provided by a scholar. He says he was intimidated by his admiration for Brecht (“second only to Shakespeare”) but was challenged by the playwright’s bitingly tough political commentary. He saw “Setzuan” as an opportunity to correct what he sees as an unwillingness in today’s theater to pose hard questions.

“Brecht coined the term ‘the dark times,’ and that’s what we’re living in,” says Kushner, describing as “idiotic” those who crow about the victory of capitalism over communism.

“The world is still thoroughly immiserated and we live among the poor, the homeless and the starving. When Shen Te picks up a kid who’s been eating out of the garbage and turns to the audience and says, ‘Don’t you care about the fruit of your own wombs, you wretched people?’ I’m certain people will get angry, get annoyed, but it has impact.”

Kushner describes “Angels in America” as almost entirely Brechtian in its dark, episodic and unashamed theatricality. But he ruefully acknowledges that he thinks Brecht himself would probably have hated the plays. “He completely rejected the spiritual and supernatural, which I simply can’t do. I can’t ignore it, because it’s there for me.”

Unlike the atheistic Brecht, who was born a Bavarian Protestant, the agnostic Kushner traces his own spirituality and solace in religious ritual to the Eastern European shtetls from which his Jewish ancestors immigrated to the United States. Kushner was born in Louisiana to a liberal progressive family of classical musicians; his mother, a bassoonist, was also an actress and, says Kushner, her appearance in a local production of “Death of a Salesman” sparked his passion for the theater when he was only 6.

He developed that, and a passion for politics as well, at Columbia and New York University’s graduate school. Shortly after finishing there, he wrote his first play, “A Bright Room Called Day,” about a group of artists in Weimar Germany; when it was presented at the Public Theatre in 1990, it received a critical drubbing. It was recently done to mixed reviews in a small production in Los Angeles.

“I received a call from the Merchant Ivory people expressing interest in making it into a film. But I don’t think it’ll be done, either as a play or film, anytime soon.”

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Kushner sharpened his political activism as an early member of the radical gay rights group ACT UP. Like many others, he has suffered devastating personal losses during the past 12 years of the AIDS epidemic. On the bookshelves of his office in Lower Manhattan are photos of Charles Ludlam, the great comic playwright who died of AIDS and whom Kushner often cites as a major influence, and of a strikingly beautiful, smiling woman, her head shaved from the effects of chemotherapy. She is Sigrid Wurschmidt, a San Francisco actress for whom Kushner originally wrote the part of the angel in “Angels,” who died of breast cancer in 1990. Since the early workshops, the part has been played by Ellen McLaughlin.

But the most emotionally wrenching experience of his life was the death of his mother, who succumbed to cancer in August, 1991, just months before he finished the first draft of “Perestroika.” He keeps a picture of her in his wallet and has established an acting scholarship in her name, Sylvia Deutscher Kushner, at NYU. Kushner says that her death and those of the other friends taught him that hope can be expressed in life only if one is willing to look into the maw of hopelessness first.

“If you know that life is basically going to be horrendously difficult, at best, and all but unlivable at worst, or possibly even unlivable, do you go on?” he asks. “And the choice to go on is the only thing that I think can be called hope. Because if hope isn’t forced to encounter the worst possibility, then it’s a lie.”

Kushner is gratified that audiences have responded so strongly to the hope expressed in “Angels” through the resilience of the frail and frightened Prior, the AIDS-stricken but fabulous queen at the center of the two plays. (The role won consecutive Tonys for actor Stephen Spinella as well.) But he says he’s “terribly disappointed and very unhappy” that the Broadway run is coming to an end only 17 months after “Millennium Approaches” opened. He had hoped the plays would run for two years at least.

“I don’t understand it, I mean ‘Life With Father’ ran eight years!” he says wryly, referring to the vintage family comedy, which holds the record for the longest dramatic run on Broadway and which couldn’t be further apart in temperament from “Angels.” “We know we got the New York intelligentsia but I think we were hoping for Madge and Louis from White Plains. I got a letter from a grandmother who’d read the plays and liked them, but she said that if she’d sat for seven hours, she’d have needed a transfusion. It seemed like too much of an endurance test.”

The national tour opens Sept. 25 in Chicago, where it will play six months before going on to Boston, Washington and Los Angeles’ Ahmanson at the Doolittle Theatre. After four weeks in L.A., the plays will start “running around” the country, the prospect of which delights Kushner, who is eager that the plays be set into the national consciousness, of theatergoers at least, before the films are released sometime in 1996.

“I hope that the movies will be ‘Bob Altman films,’ not just replications of the plays,” he says, expressing admiration for the improvisational style of the maverick director, who himself has directed theater. “ ‘Angels’ is Altmanesque in the interweaving of characters and the epic form which ‘Nashville’ (directed by Altman) invented for American audiences. He’s somebody who tries to break new ground with each film.”

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On the coffee table in Kushner’s library, in fact, is a paperback of “Altman’s America,” and the playwright goes on to note that the director’s take on the country is “more despairing and less romanticized” than his own. The crazy quilt of characters in “Angels in America” fits Altman, Kushner says, but “I’m still fairly romantic about this country. I still believe that the Constitution and Bill of Rights are amazing documents, and while our politicians continue to betray us, there is this strange kind of progress that Louis (one of the lead characters) talks about in ‘Millennium’: ‘the shifting downwards and outwards of political power to the people.’ ”

Reached by phone, Altman said that if he is more despairing about America than Kushner, it’s probably because “I’m a lot older than he is.” The 69-year-old director added that what appealed to him most about “Angels” was the Reagan-era politics and the opportunity to explore new territory through what he described as “the social phenomenon of the acceptance of the gay condition.”

“It’s been done in very extreme manners in the past,” Altman said. Although he described “Philadelphia” as a “noble film,” he compared its “naivete” in presenting gay sexuality to the naivete expressed in the 1930s film “It Happened One Night,” in which an unmarried couple spend a night together in a motel but first spread a sheet across the room.

“These things generally evolve in stages, and ‘Philadelphia’ opened up a much, much larger audience for us. It doesn’t interest me very much to make art for a group that is already on your side.”

Kushner is also adamant that the tentativeness with which recent film have dealt with gay sexuality is not going to be the case in “Angels.” Though he says he, too, liked “Philadelphia,” he thought that the fact that Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas, who played lovers in the movie, were not shown in intimate situations was fraudulent.

“It makes me nuts,” Kushner says. “At this point any film about lesbians and gays where there is no kissing, well, people should just be spanked. There will be a lot of kissing, and much more, in ‘Angels.’ ”

Altman is less definite: “Sexuality, in general, can make for an uncomfortable situation on film,” he said, “and we want to make a film that an audience will sit and experience. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I will deal with it as it arises.”

While praising Altman for being unimpressed enough with Hollywood logic to want to make two films of “Angels,” Kushner says he is just as mystified with his own limited doses of how the film world works. He says he turned down the offer to do revisions of the screenplay of “The Flintstones.” “I can’t think of a worse nightmare than being paid lots of money to sit in a room and come up with jokes for Barney and Fred and Wilma and Betty,” he says. “Apparently they got dozens of writers to do that and the movie was still awful and it still made $121 million!”

Acknowledging that he is a playwright, not a screenwriter, Kushner says that while many people are pessimistic about the future of serious dramatic writing, he personally believes that American playwrights may well be close to a golden age, given the vitality of regional theaters--he will be directing “In the Heart of America,” a play by Naomi Wallace, one of his NYU playwriting students, at New Haven’s Long Wharf this fall.

He is especially sanguine about what he calls the new gay “Theatre of the Fabulous,” which draws on the work of seminal gay writers like Tennessee Williams, while building on the new gay mythology. An example would be a scene from “Perestroika” in which Kushner sends up “The Wizard of Oz.” Or when Prior campily recalls Blanche’s line from “Streetcar Named Desire”--”I’ve always relied on the kindness of strangers”--the Mormon mother saltily replies, “Well, that’s a stupid thing to do!”

“Gay writers now have both a sense of history and the fables that allows them to dwell in the realms of the ridiculous and at the same time talk seriously about things,” says Kushner, noting that early gay glitter theater was so camp and double-edged that, while it could debunk morality, it couldn’t evoke it. “Harvey Fierstein (“Torch Song Trilogy”) was the first to step over the line from pure camp comedy to a more serious emotional statement.”

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In his personal life, Kushner hasn’t been relying on the kindness of strangers. He is single, though he says his closest and most emotionally fulfilling, if not sexual, relationship is with a woman, his longtime friend Kimberly T. Flynn.

Asked if relationships with men are complicated by his success and fame, he answers self-mockingly: “They’re complicated by weight . . . which comes from fame and success. I don’t look like Keanu Reeves, so when people express an interest, which happens rarely but does, believe it or not, happen, I sort of go, ‘Well, why?’ ”

What he says he likes to snuggle up with most is a good book, and he is thinking about writing one, although a collection of his essays may come first. But he hopes to be “a little silly” in his approach to any intellectual endeavor.

“Intellectuals tend to take themselves much too seriously anyway, too self-righteous and self-important,” he says. “It’s ego. Most people who set out to write gay manifestoes end up falling on their face. We need to have grand theories of history, but we also have to remember that millions of people have been sacrificed to theories because they weren’t good enough. That’s doesn’t excuse us from writing them. But whenever you write a manifesto, you should also realize that you’re being a horse’s patoot . Art should have a political impact, but it’s also just art and therefore a little silly.”

* “The Good Person of Setzuan,” La Jolla Playhouse, Mandell Weiss Theatre, La Jolla Village Drive and Torrey Pines Road, (619) 550-1010. Opens today, 8 p.m. Regular schedule: Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Aug. 28. $19-$32.