Tony Kushner American Literature Analysis
Tony Kushner, who embraces such epithets as “Jewish writer” and “gay writer,” is a maverick, a bold, fearless, overtly political playwright and social activist who has revolutionized the form and content of modern theater. He sees deep into the human heart and soul and touches all humankind. He is a writer of comedy in the classical sense since many of his characters overcome horrendous obstacles to achieve survival and renewal. With literary influences as disparate as Brecht and Tennessee Williams and use of contrasting characters to show how different people can learn from one another, Kushner’s plays also radiate passionate drama, surrealism, and unabashed theatricality.
Kushner is particularly attracted to transitional points in history such as the rise of Nazi Germany (A Bright Room Called Day), the heightening of capitalism (Hydriotaphia), the approach of the new millennium (Angels in America), Western involvement in the Middle East (Homebody/Kabul), and the fight for human equality (Caroline, or Change). Into dark times, Kushner shines a warm, bright, and guardedly hopeful literary beacon because he believes that the human race, individuals and groups, can slowly and painfully change.
Fascinated by human “journeys” of change, Kushner enlivens this motif as a broader struggle from the past, through the present, to the future. Angels in America, for example, begins with the death of a Jewish grandmother who symbolizes the courage, challenges, and values of the past, while Louis, Prior, and the others live in a present society in which Kushner sees ostentatious greed, heartlessness, and narrow-mindedness personified by Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush. The female angel that wrestles with Prior is an emissary from an apocalyptic future; when she exhorts humans to stop progressing, Prior, despite life’s heartbreak, loss, anguish, and disease, chooses more life, more future, a longer “journey.”
Kushner also sees the metaphoric, psychic “journey” as inherent in the literal, physical trip. In Angels in America, Sarah Ironson physically traveled from Europe to the United States, but her “journey” included enduring anti-Semitism and adjusting to very different mores. Mormons Joe, Harper, and Hannah Pitt physically traveled from Utah to New York; Joe’s inner “journey” is to transcend his Mormon upbringing and accept his sexual orientation, while Hannah “journeys” within from a dogmatic, inflexible morality to an enlightened, loving understanding of others. Harper fulfills her “journey” by realizing that she deserves to be loved and is transformed into a voice for peace and healing.
Kushner is a humanistic playwright. He paints no stereotypical, inarticulate, or one-dimensional characters, for even the mendacious Roy Cohn in Angels inAmerica has moments when the audience spies the hurt and pain beneath the rage and denial. Homosexual, heterosexual, liberal, conservative, Muslim, Mormon, Protestant, Jew, black, white—each of these seeming opposites can and must learn from the other, Kushner feels, if civilization is to survive.
In her 1940 novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers describes a perception of life as “suspended between radiance and darkness. Between bitter irony and faith.” So feels Kushner about life and the world, but like a great composer of contrapuntal music, he plays one of these seemingly opposite emotions, then the other, until his fugue, his melodies of opposites, bridges together, intersects, merges, and becomes one, just like the human race.
With fiery passion and compassion, Kushner exhorts his audience to recognize and learn from its common humanity, the interconnectedness and interdependence of all people. He is determined that despite the countless discouragements of the modern age, people may choose to live beyond hope. In his powerful...
(This entire section contains 2522 words.)
Unlock this Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
work, Kushner brings people to, and gives them, themselves.
Angels in America
First produced: 1991 (first published, 1992)
Type of work: Play
Angels in America takes place in 1980’s New York City and involves the interconnectedness of diverse relationships, characters, and political, spiritual, social, and human themes.
Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes consists of two plays: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika.Millennium Approaches opens with a funeral service for Louis Ironson’s grandmother, who represents all of the horrendous experiences and hard-won values of immigrants to the United States.
Kushner elucidates two contrasting relationships that are at turning points: Mormons Joe and Harper Pitt (a married couple) and Louis Ironson and Prior Walter (a gay couple). The Pitts, who have moved from Utah to New York so that Joe could work as a law clerk, are barely communicating, each fighting inner demons: Joe’s inner battle is repressed homosexuality, and Harper’s is deep depression about her empty life and marriage. Prior confesses to Louis that he is HIV-positive and is frightened that Louis will leave him. The major theme of loss and abandonment is introduced.
Joe’s life is the first to intersect with Roy Cohn, the only character based on a historical figure. Cohn (a closeted homosexual who spoke out against homosexuality and died of AIDS in 1986) became famous when he obtained the death penalty for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on flimsy spy charges. Then Cohn assisted Senator Joseph McCarthy’s purge of alleged communists in the early 1950’s, ruining many innocent lives and careers.
With the cool, amoral calculation of an animalistic predator, Cohn, in order to protect himself from government intervention, tries to illegally manipulate Joe into working for him in the Reagan administration. Meanwhile, Harper, in a Valium-induced hallucination, encounters Prior, and these seeming opposites understand each other’s feelings of loss, sadness, and loneliness.
The theme of physical and emotional abandonment continues when Louis gets Prior to the hospital but leaves because he cannot endure the stress of Prior’s illness. Concurrently, an intoxicated Joe telephones his mother (Hannah) from a pay phone in Central Park to announce that he is gay; his mother rebukes him for drinking and comes to New York.
Louis’s guilty conscience about abandoning Prior surfaces with Prior’s good friend Belize, an African American gay nurse. In surreal scenes, Harper abandons Joe through a hallucinatory trip to Antarctica, while Prior is visited by two ghosts of his ancestors and, climactically, by an angel.
Perestroika continues the theme of human interconnectedness with Cohn’s admission to the hospital with AIDS; his nurse is Belize. Joe and Louis have begun an affair while Prior is visited by an angel who crashes through his ceiling and proclaims that Prior is a prophet. Later, when Prior collapses, Hannah helps him to the hospital and stays with him, establishing trust between them. Meanwhile, Cohn, with friends in the Reagan White House, has secured a stash of AZT, a very rare experimental AIDS drug.
Relationships unravel as Prior discerns that Louis is having an affair. Belize shocks Louis by revealing that Joe is a visitor to Cohn’s hospital room. Joe finally admits to Harper that he has no feeling for her and physically attacks Louis when Louis rebukes him for his hypocritical, homophobic legal decisions. Harper accepts the end of her marriage and flies across the country to start anew.
Past, present, and the supernatural interconnect as Cohn dies after the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg tells him that he has been disbarred; despite Cohn’s irredeemable nature, Belize still insists that Louis say Kaddish, the Jewish Prayer for the Dead, for Cohn and secretly gives Louis the remaining AZT for Prior. The angel revisits Prior, explains that God has abandoned humanity, and insists that Prior choose the peace of death. However, Prior ascends to heaven (a place, Kushner writes, like San Francisco) and asks, despite his illness, for more life.
Each of Kushner’s characters experiences an internal “journey” of change most often motivated by other people. Such contrasting characters as a gay man with AIDS and a devoted Mormon (Prior and Hannah) teach one another that change requires that humans push beyond their comfort zone and open themselves to learn from others. Joe and Louis learn from each other too, as do Harper and Prior, Cohn and Belize, and Belize and Louis.
In Perestroika’s last scene, set four years later at a symbol of healing (the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park), Prior (alive and stable), Hannah, Belize, and even Louis have created a loving family of friends, and Prior offers the play’s last words in favor of more love, more life, and full enfranchisement for gay people.
Through such otherworldly imagery as ghosts and angels and through such earthly grandeur as the “journeys” and resilience of the human spirit, Angels in America boldly and fearlessly metamorphoses rage, pain, fear, humor, and love into a huge and astonishing epic work about courage, forgiveness, and redemption.
Homebody/Kabul
First produced: 2001 (first published, 2002)
Type of work: Play
Homebody/Kabul is a powerful vision of the human inability to understand different people and places.
Homebody/Kabul commences with a long monologue delivered by a middle-aged woman (“Homebody”) who discourses upon her empty marriage and inexorable attraction to exotic and beautiful Afghanistan because she learns from an old travel book about its ancient and modern struggles against Western colonialism. This is ironic since Homebody is British, and Great Britain was a major colonialist power.
Interwoven with this history lesson, Homebody’s detailed ruminations include a story about her purchase of ten Afghan hats to give to friends as party favors. As she pays for the hats, Homebody notices that three fingers on the merchant’s right hand are missing, cut off, he explains, by the Russian colonialists.
The scene shifts to Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, with several new characters, including Homebody’s husband (Milton) and daughter (Priscilla), as well as a British government liaison (Quango Twisleton), an Afghan guide and poet (Khwaje Aziz Mondanabosh), and a librarian, wife of an Afghan doctor (Mahala).
Milton (a cold, unfeeling computer expert) and Priscilla (a lonely and lost character) have traveled to Afghanistan to locate Homebody, who has disappeared in Kabul. According to the dictatorial Taliban, Homebody was brutally killed by a mob because she failed to observe the proper traditions of female dress. Since her body has not been found, her family rejects this scenario.
Priscilla is absolutely determined to discover her mother’s fate, so she hires an Afghan guide (Khwaje), who believes that Homebody is alive and is remarried to a Muslim doctor; consequently, Khwaje insists that Priscilla and Milton must take in exchange the doctor’s Muslim wife. Mahala rages in several languages at the United States for meddling in Afghan politics, thereby strengthening the Taliban. At the end of the play, Priscilla is back in London, where Milton and Mahala are living together.
Kushner evokes the theme of the biblical Tower of Babel since at least seven different languages are spoken in the play: Dari, Pushto, French, German, Russian, English, and the universal language, Esperanto. This suggests the confusing linguistic obstacles inherent in communication between the West and Afghanistan as well as within Afghanistan itself.
Kushner is suggesting that one’s attempts at learning about different cultures are impeded by an inability to cast aside one’s ingrained cultural “skin” to objectively try on a different one. A person’s comfort that his or her way is right just because it is familiar is an impediment to international communication.
Another biblical allusion is the discovery that Kabul is the site of Cain’s grave. In the Old Testament, Cain killed his brother Abel, and Kushner uses this thematic resonance to suggest that nowadays humans ignorantly commit fratricide against their “brothers” of different cultures because they cannot or will not comprehend a culture other than their own. Kushner suggests that the results of widespread xenophobia are obstructions to human understanding and produce political-military blunders at best, human catastrophe at worst.
Caroline, or Change
First produced: 2003 (first published, 2004)
Type of work: Play
Caroline, or Change is a musical-opera that takes place during the early 1960’s in Louisiana and concerns the relationship between a young Jewish boy and his family’s black maid.
Quasi-autobiographical, rife with symbolism, and redolent of an era pregnant with change in American history, Caroline, or Change harks back to Kushner’s childhood. To this story of change and loss, he adds fanciful, nonrealistic touches such as the singing washing machine, dryer, bus, and moon.
Eight-year-old Noah Gellman, who recently lost his mother to cancer, has a new stepmother (Rose) whom he loathes and a surrogate mother, the family’s black maid, Caroline Thibodeaux, whom he idolizes.
Stuffing her anger deep inside, Caroline, staunch, exhausted, and poor, is forced to work in the hot basement laundry room for thirty dollars per week. Divorced with four children (one a soldier in Vietnam), she laments her life and remembers her ex-husband who returned from World War II and, unemployed, became an abusive alcoholic; ironically, Caroline and Noah similarly deal with grief and loss.
“Change” in the play’s title has different meanings. The main conceit of the play is that Rose has rebuked Noah for his careless attitude about money since he often leaves change in his pockets. Since its phases signal change, the Moon sings about the progress ahead, another meaning of “change.” When the bus tells of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (a supporter of equal rights), Caroline laments what might have been and wonders what change is coming for black people.
When Rose announces that Caroline may keep any change that she finds in Noah’s pockets, Caroline can now buy candy for her children. Noah is so lonely that he purposely leaves change in his pockets, hoping that he can “buy” his adoption into Caroline’s family.
Another aspect of “change” occurs at the Gellmans’ Hannukah party, where Caroline, her teenage daughter Emmie, and their friend Dotty are working in the kitchen. Emmie speaks strongly to Rose’s father (Mr. Stopnick) about her belief in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s organized nonviolent resistance, while Caroline rebukes her daughter for standing up to white people. Clearly, Emmie’s voice is that of imminent social change, from deferential acquiescence to protest.
Mr. Stopnick presents Noah with a twenty-dollar bill, which Noah absentmindedly leaves in his pocket. When Caroline takes the money, Noah is furious, and they exchange evil racial epithets. Caroline leaves for several days but realizes painfully that she must return to work. In an epilogue, the audience learns that the statue of a Confederate soldier that had disappeared early in the play was actually decapitated and thrown into the bayou by Emmie, her symbol of real social change to come.
Water imagery plays a role in the play too. Because parts of Louisiana are below sea level, Noah worries that his mother is underwater. The washing machine, through which Caroline earns her pathetic income, requires water, and Caroline suffers real and metaphoric “tears” of exasperation for an employer and society that understand little of her painful degradation. Noah’s name too is symbolic and ironic since, like the biblical Noah who survived for forty days floating on water, Kushner’s Noah is surviving but feels as if he is drowning in tears of grief and loss. Kushner seems to be saying that change for people—and more so for society—is very slow and filled with painful tears.