The Lighter Side: Tony Kushner’s Play
Tony Kushner’s Play: “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures ”
by: Frank Rubenfeld on July 16th, 2014 | No Comments »
Today I saw a matinee of Tony Kushner’s “An Intelligent Homosexuals’ Guide…” with a full house attending at the Berkeley Rep. The play first opened in Minneapolis in 2007, and then played briefly in NYC at the Public Theater but did not have its West Coast opening until now.
Most of the more than three hours of the play takes place in a marvelous two-layered set, showing the ground floor and upstairs bed room of the patriarch, seventy-two year old Lou Liberatore, a card carrying member of the Communist Party USA and retired union organizer once active in the Longshoreman’s Union. He has two sons and a daughter, (one son and the daughter are gay), who are presently spending time with him since he’s informed them that he plans to commit suicide soon and wants to settle accounts with them. A year prior, he had made an unsuccessful attempt by slitting his wrists in a bathtub (Roman style). This engendered much upset and anger among his children. The plot line that carries the play forward is whether or not he will follow through on his plan despite the anguished, fervent entreaties of his kids not do so.
That is the structure that Kushner erects, and we can focus on one side or the other in the suicide debate, but the play holds so much more. Kushner’s consciousness is vast, and he has us bouncing back and forth from the individual to the all-encompassing societal and historical forces present in early twenty-first century America ...
More here: http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2014/07/16/tony-kushners-play-the-intelligent-homosexuals-guide-to-capitalism-and-socialism-with-a-key-to-the-scriptures/
Has anyone seen this?
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