UPDATE (15 July): More responses at Art Hennessy’s Mirror Up to Nature journal here.
In contradiction to many of my colleagues, I have been ambivalent about the plays of Tony Kushner since I saw the Broadway production of Perestroika (the second half of Angels in America) in 1994; the television version of both plays which ran on HBO a few years later left me no less ambivalent. They were, it seemed to me, overwritten and possessed of longeurs that could have easily been eliminated through a careful rewrite process, his characters curiously uninvolving (with the exception of the monstrous Roy Cohn) and I was never entirely convinced by arguments from Kushner enthusiasts that he was among the greatest American dramatists of the century, if not the greatest.
Terry Teachout and I have rarely agreed on anything through our six or seven year acquaintanceship, but I do find much to agree with in Terry’s essay “Tony Kushner’s Characters Should Stop Talking Now,” which appears in the July 2011 issue of Commentary. Despite that slightly incendiary headline, the essay is a fair-minded assessment of Kushner’s strengths and weaknesses, and I find it refreshing that Terry lays the blame for Kushner’s reluctance to confront the shortcomings of his writing not at the writer’s own feet, but at those of his adulators:
Like all genuine artists, Kushner writes not as he should but as he must, and his diffuse discursiveness is undoubtedly in part a function of his temperament. Still, the success of Angels in America seems to have confirmed Kushner in the belief that the iron law of economy that governs traditional theatrical storytelling does not apply to him. Not only is The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide enervatingly long-winded, but his last full-evening play, Homebody/Kabul (2001), was an even longer monstrosity in which a genuinely provocative discussion of Islamic fundamentalism and its discontents was buried beneath an incoherent mélange of domestic melodrama and arch drawing-room comedy.
Could it be that Kushner (as the saying goes) came to believe his own reviews? If so, then perhaps the reception of The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide will inspire him to reconsider. Anyone capable of writing the best scenes in Angels in America, after all, is surely capable of sustaining their incisiveness throughout the length of an entire play. But as it stands now, Kushner’s chronic garrulity threatens to reduce him to the status of a historical curiosity, a gifted but undisciplined writer who failed to live up to his early promise.
The full essay is here. We appreciate A.C. Douglas‘s pointing us to this link.
I agree with you entirely about Kushner. I returned to New York from Berlin, where I was living at the time, and was excited to see Millenium Approaches I was bitterly disappointed, and actually couldn’t endure the whole evening. I bid my astonished friends good night at intermission.
That he is held up as a paragon of intellectual sophistication, to say nothing of playwriting, is a sad commentary on the thinness of our culture at this moment.
Thanks for pointing this out.