Friday 3 June 2011

I Bless You: More Truth

Angels in America established that (Tony) Kushner is a great playwright.”
Ben Brantley, “New York Times,” May 5, 2011

“(Headline) `Overhyped playwright seeks Israel’s destruction. Details at six.”
 David Frum, “National Post,” May 14, 2011

            Just over a week after Tony Kushner’s latest play The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide To Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures opened off-Broadway at the Public Theatre, “National Post” columnist David Frum weighed in on the controversy regarding the City University of New York’s (CUNY) decision to rescind an honorary degree they had granted to Kushner, an action precipitated by CUNY Trustee Jeffrey S. Weisenfeld.  This investment adviser, who was appointed to the Board by former Republican New York Governor George Pataki, bitterly denounced Kushner as “a self-hating, Jewish anti-Semite.”
I consider the CUNY debacle to be a modern day example of “tin-pot” McCarthyism.  It’s amazing that Weisenfeld, also an aide to former New York Republican Senator Alfonse D’Amato, fails to see the absurdity that Kushner may be accomplished enough to receive a Pulitzer, but not worthy of an honorary degree from CUNY.
 The details of this contretemps are available on the net, including Kushner’s brilliant and eloquent letter to the CUNY board that led them to reverse their decision and grant him the degree after all.
A former speechwriter for Republican U.S. President George W. Bush, Frum is credited by some for coining the phrase “axis of evil” that Bush used in the 2002 State of theUnion address.  He resigned as a speechwriter that February after only about two years on the job, an event that was debated whether or not he left of his own accord, according to London’s “Guardian” newspaper.
In his column, Frum smugly and arrogantly denounced Kushner, a Pulitzer-Prize laureate (as previously mentioned) and recipient of two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, an Emmy Award and 2005 Oscar nomination as co-writer (with Eric Roth, Forrest Gump, Benjamin Button) of Steven Spielberg’s acclaimed Munich.
He described Angels in America as “a seven-hour-long play that combined ideas of gay liberation with ideas leftover from 1950s-vintage Communist fellow travelling, (whatever that means).  “The play gained immense praise in the 1980s,” he admitted,…”but I will note…that in a quarter-century of spending a lot of time with literary types, I have never heard anybody quote a memorable line from the play or spontaneously mention the names of any of its characters…”  Frum missed the fact that Angels continues to receive praise, even in the “New York Times” as recently as a fortnight before the “National Post” published his own diatribe.
Back in 1993 when the play premiered, Frank Rich of the “New York Times”  called it “an astonishing theatrical landscape,” concluding that Kushner “has written the most thrilling American play in years.
            Perhaps Frum’s memory problems--and his vain attempt at cultural revisionism—stems from the fact that many of the characters, especially the villains, are prominent  Republicans.  Frum, you see, was a volunteer for the Reagan presidential campaign back in 1980.  The two parts of AngelsMillennium Approaches and Perestroika—are set during the Reagan administration of the mid-1980s.  The plays eviscerate him, especially how he ignored the onset of the devastating HIV-AIDS plague and blithely ignored the deaths of thousands.
            The villain of the sub-plot is Roy Cohn, prominent Republican lawyer and key adviser to Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, who headed the infamous communist-seeking “witch-hunts” of the 1950s.  Cohn is notorious for sending the Rosenbergs to the electric chair.  Ironic, isn’t it, how Cohn’s and Weisenfeld’s bullying tactics are so similar and how Kushner himself is now the victim of a witch-hunt that would, in effect, ostracize him from his own community?  The difference is, Cohn called his enemies “communists” while Weisenfeld labels those who dispute his world view “anti-Semites.” 
What makes Cohn additionally loathsome was his opposition to make new AZT drugs widely available to members of the public suffering from HIV/AIDS even though he was a closeted gay man himself.  He died in 1986 of complications due to the illness.  To the end, he alleged that his malady was liver cancer. Cohn was a scoundrel to the end.  His absolute goal was “to die completely broke and owing millions to the IRS,” said Republican political consultant Roger Stone who considered him to be a role model.  Cohn “succeeded in that,” Stone said.
Frum further claims that neither he nor his “literary type” friends are able to remember any of the lines from the Angels. I have to admit, I’m hard-pressed—as are the hipsters in my literary crowd—to remember any lines from Bush’s biography Decision Points or even Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue.  (Wait a minute, I do remember one:  “You betcha!”)  One of my favorites of Kushner’s in Angels is a witty observation about the American disaffected spoken by the sassy Belize, the black, gay nurse.  He opines:  “I hate America, Louis.  I hate this country.  Nothing but a bunch of big ideas and stories and people dying….The white cracker who wrote the National Anthem knew what he was doing.  He set the word free to a note so high nobody could reach it.   That was deliberate.”
Today, twenty years since I saw Perestroika on Broadway, I still remember the extraordinary, chilling scene in which the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg visits the emaciated Roy Cohn as he lays dying.  She helps a living character, Louis, say Kaddish for her executioner.  It’s a remarkable scene of humanity, of forgiveness, as Louis repeats/recites her words from beyond, even though she comically concludes by saying “You son of a bitch!”
And, of course, there’s the hero Prior Walter’s moving benediction at the finale:  “This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all.  And the dead will be commemorated and we will struggle on with the living.  And we are not going away.  We won’t die secret deaths anymore.  The world only spins forward.  We will be citizens.  The time has come.  Bye now.  You are fabulous creatures, and I bless you: more life.  The great work begins.”
We will be citizens; a simple phrase that resonates so greatly in our troubled times.
I remember sitting in New York’s Walter Kerr theatre and chatting with the great actor James Earl Jones who just happened to be sitting behind my wife and me.  I asked him his opinion.  With his eyes wide in astonishment, he confided, in his basso profundo, “I haven’t seen anything this epic on Broadway since we did The Great White Hope.”
Last month in his review of The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide etc., Ben Brantley of the “New York Times” called Kushner “perhaps the most intellectually far-reaching of all major mainstream American playwrights…No play by (him) is going to be only a love story or a family drama.  His masterwork, Angels in America, is so remarkable precisely because it places vibrantly individual characters in a really, really big context, one that’s historical, political, even cosmic.  And yet it holds onto those characters’ autonomous individuality.
“Though Guide is more naturalistic than Angels, which visited heaven and Antarctica, it shares the same central concern:  How do we live when the old systems of belief and morality that gave form to our existence have fallen apart or proved empty?”
New Yorker critic, John Lahr, has written:  (Kushner) takes an almost carnal glee in tackling the most difficult subjects in contemporary history—among them AIDS and the conservative counter-revolution…He gives voice to characters who have been rendered powerless by the forces of circumstances…and his attempt to see all sides of their predicament has a sly subversiveness.  He forces the audience to identify with the marginalized—a humanizing act of the imagination.”
As for Frum, during his recent appearance on HBO’s “Real Time,” claiming that Obama’s successful elimination of bin Laden was due to preparatory work done by George Bush, panelist Jeremy Schahill, national security correspondent for “The Nation,” derided Frum, saying he had “a doctorate in political revisionism.”  Considering Frum’s recent comments about Kushner in his Post column, perhaps he’s trying for the same distinction with his attempt at cultural revisionism.
Next month, the 20th anniversary edition of Angels in America is scheduled to be published, just in time for Kushner’s visit to Ontario.  Guide is inspired, in part, by an essay written by that other “:overhyped” hack, George Bernard Shaw,  titled The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism.  So, it’s only fitting and timely that he participate in a theatre forum at the Shaw Festival.  It’s called
 “The Speed of Ideas.”
 Let’s hope, for his sake, that David Frum isn’t left at the starting gate.
n  Dennis Kucherawy

The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide To Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures is scheduled to be published this December.  The play is still running off-Broadway at New York’s Public Theatre.

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