Introduction of Tony Kushner
By Andrew Elfenbein, Professor of English
I want to welcome on behalf of the University of Minnesota’s English Department everyone who has come tonight. It is a real privilege to have the Beach Lecture to help the department in bringing important developments in American literary arts to as wide an audience as possible. It is a particular pleasure to welcome tonight Pulitzer- and double Tony Award-winning dramatist Tony Kushner. He is probably most familiar from his two-part drama Angels in America, which played to packed houses here in Minneapolis, and also received a distinguished production earlier this year at the University, under the direction of Lou Bellamy. Impressive as Angels is, Kushner’s accomplishments range even more widely, including the recent dramas Slavs! and The Dybbuk, and many outspoken articles, interviews, and commentaries about gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender concerns, the state of American politics and education, and the role of the artist.
But I want to do more than measure accomplishments by listing titles or reeling off awards. Instead, I want to think about what really strikes me in Kushner’s work, what seems to make him so exceptional in the contemporary American context. My thoughts have been shaped by the fact that Passover starts this Friday, and I have a chance once again to brood on puzzling sections of the Passover service. The Haggadah, the guide for the Seder, includes a weird midrash in its account of the ten plagues. As in all midrash, the rabbis zero in on Biblical passages and argue about them. In their discussion of the plagues, they engage in a kind of betting game, each trying to prove that the ten plagues were really more than just ten. Their efforts are nothing if not inventive. One joins two passages to prove that the ten plagues were really 50. Since, in one passage, the ten plagues are described as the finger of God, and in another, God shows a “strong hand” against Egypt, the rabbi decides that a five-fingered hand must have caused 50 plagues. For another, since each plague was accompanied by four qualities, “wrath, indignation, trouble, and the messengers of evil,” each plague must really have been four plagues— upping the total to 200. Unwilling to stop there, another rabbi triumphantly adds “burning anger” to the list of qualities, which allows him to reach 250
This year, at least for me, the point of their one-upmanship seems to be about not resting with a received story. Anybody can know that there were just ten plagues, because that is what is told. But for the creative interpreter, the job is not to reject the story, but to unlock it, open it up, expand its possibilities. With a little imagination, you can show that the stakes were much greater than they had at first seemed because, if you work at it, ten can become 250. It seems that now, in the 1990s, this unlocking has become the job of art. Just as the rabbis had their story to open up, so does the dramatist, and this job is the one that Tony Kushner does better than anyone else. He, too, faced a received story: AIDS was only about gay men, and any drama about it would be necessarily limited. The accomplishment of Angels in America was to take that story and unlock it, to prove that the implications of this plague reached far more widely and deeply than they had seemed to at first. With enough insight and ambition, the dramatist can show that gay issues are not “just” gay issues, but ones that reach into every corner of the national consciousness. “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes” unlocks the big picture in the smaller received story, in a way that no other discourse around seems to be able to do.
In a culture that insists on the momentary, the sound bite, the segment, Kushner’s plays do the hard work of expanding the possibilities, of turning the ten into the 250. In so doing, they point to a different way of seeing, a chance for alternatives that had been glimpsed, but not realized. As Adrienne Rich writes, “Any truly revolutionary art is an alchemy through which waste, greed, brutality, frozen indifference, ‘blind sorrow,’ and anger are transmuted into some drenching recognition of the What if?—the possible” (241). Angels are not around to accomplish the work of the possible, and, from Kushner’s play, it is not clear that we would listen, anyway. Artists, however, are around, and we are lucky to be able to hear them at the University of Minnesota’s Beach Lecture. Please join me in welcoming Tony Kushner, and his talk, “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures.”
April 8, 1998
Ted Mann Concert Hall