Tony Kushner

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Tony Kushner Drama Analysis

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Tony Kushner has forged a new reputation as a spokesperson for change and progress during politically conservative times. In the early 1990’s, his seven-hour, two-part Broadway production of Angels in America transformed him from an unknown gay Jewish activist into the most promising, highly acclaimed playwright of his generation, who insisted on the power of theater to convey important truths. In this work, Kushner is concerned with the moral responsibilities of people during war and politically repressive times. He insists on political messages in all of his plays, opposing the popular notions that Americans do not like politics and that entertainment cannot be political. Although socialist politics and gay rights are not always mainstream topics, Kushner feels that artists need to be willing to take an issue that they feel passionately about and to address themselves to it extensively to build a consensus among groups. Kushner wants his plays to be part of a large political movement that teaches responsibility, honesty, social justice, and altruism. Kushner’s plays are dark and speak about death, but they are full of hope for future change. He does not back away from difficult and unpopular social issues.

A Bright Room Called Day

Kushner’s first important play was conceived during President Ronald Reagan’s re-election in 1984, but its historical setting is 1932-1933 in the Weimar Republic of Germany before World War II. A close group of friends lose track of each other as they are forced into hiding during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. Kushner attempted to link the politics of Nazi Germany with the conservative Republican administration of Reagan, which caused many critics to complain about Kushner’s implicit comparison of Reagan to Hitler, the Nazi totalitarian. In one version of the play, a contemporary American character, Zillah Katz, moves to Berlin in the recently reunified Germany, where she lives in the apartment of Agnes Eggling, one of the original members of the German friends during World War II. Zillah and Agnes communicate to each other through dreams, though separated by forty years in time, and Zillah is inspired to political activism. Kushner raises the idea that all human actions are political.

Angels in America, Part One

This play initially came to life in a poem that Kushner wrote after finishing graduate studies at New York University. The poem was about gay men, Mormons, and the famous lawyer Roy Cohn. Originally conceived as a ninety-minute comedy, the play blossomed into two parts about the state of the United States and its struggles with sexual, racial, religious, and social issues such as the AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) epidemic. Angels in America mixes reality and fantasy. Though it is filled with many different characters, Kushner designed Angels in America to be performed by eight actors each of whom plays several roles. This groundbreaking play focuses on three households in turmoil: a gay couple, Louis Ironson and Prior Walter, struggling with AIDS; another couple Harper Pitt and Joe Pitt, who is a Morman man coming to terms with his own sexuality; and the high-profile lawyer Roy Cohn, a historical person who died of AIDS in 1986. Cohn denied his homosexuality his whole life and persecuted gays. Cohn also helped Senator Joseph McCarthy persecute suspected members of the Communist Party in the 1950’s. The subtitle Millennium Approaches describes the impending doom that the character Prior feels when dealing with the deadly disease AIDS. Prior’s illness heightens his sense of a coming apocalypse. Toward the conclusion of the play, a gloriously triumphant angel descends on Prior, rescuing him from death. Prior’s lover Louis has abandoned him in cowardly fear of...

(This entire section contains 1478 words.)

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the illness. The angel tells Prior he has been selected to be a prophet: “Greetings, Prophet;/ The Great Work begins:/ The Messenger has arrived.” The play’s main statement is that the United States’ response to the AIDS epidemic has been politicized and ineffective.

Angels in America, Part Two

This play continues the themes of Part One, but it is a more somber play, getting its subtitle, perestroika, from Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev’s Russian word for the attempt at “restructuring” the nation’s economic and social policies. The story of Prior’s encounter with the angel continues. The angel tells Prior that God has abandoned his creation and that Prior has been anointed to resist modernity and return the world to the “good old days.” Rejecting the authority granted him, Prior tells the angel that he is not a prophet and wants to be left alone to die in peace. Prior journeys to heaven to talk with God. The wondrous being that visited Prior at the end of Part One turns out to personify stagnancy or death, causing Prior to reject his commission. The lawyer Roy Cohn dies, but his spirit makes appearances later in the play, taking on the role of a lawyer for God. Even as he is dying, Roy Cohn tries to manipulate the system and get special medical attention and trick the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg into singing him a lullaby. At the play’s conclusion, the major characters are gathered around the statue of the Bethesda angel in Central Park, where no water runs in the winter. Prior has been living with AIDS for five years, and he and his friends tell the story of the original fountain of Bethesda: When the millennium comes, everyone suffering in body or spirit who walks through the waters of the fountain will be healed and washed clean of pain. Prior and his friends represent a variety of religious and racial backgrounds and various sexual orientations. Even though the real angels seem incompetent and careless, the friends gathered at the Bethesda fountain represent a positive coalition working together to cure the ills of society. The perestroika of the subtitle speaks about the fundamental restructuring necessary in order to confront grave medical, social, and economic issues of the late twentieth century.

Slavs!

This play uses materials from the two-part Angels play, and it resembles the earlier play because of its interest in the matrix of social, economic, and political change resulting from the collapse of the Soviet Union. The play portrays the negative effects on people resulting from a lack of coherent leadership. The play begins on a frozen Moscow street in 1985, where two women discuss the failures of Soviet socialism. The character Aleksii Prelapsarianov, borrowed from the second part of Angels in America, is called “the world’s oldest living Bolshevik” in Slavs! Prelapsarianov is concerned that the modern reformers do not have sufficient intellectual principles to guide them: “How are we to proceed without theory? Is it enough to reject the past, is it wise to move forward in this blind fashion, without the cold brilliant light of theory to guide the way?” Kushner makes a statement about the lack of direction in modern times. Socialism looks to the past in order to get the structure of the future, but modern restructuring does not have coherent theory to direct it. The very last line of the play, “What is to be done?” is asked throughout the play. Despite the failure of communism and the discrediting of socialist theory, the capitalism of the West has failed to find an answer to social and economic injustice. The most emotional statement of this conundrum comes from the lips of Vodya Domik, an eight-year-old mute girl who died as a result of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown. She regains her voice along with a disheartened vision of the bitter reality of history: “Perhaps it is true that social justice, economic justice, equality, community, an end to master and slave, the withering away of the state: these are desirable but not realizable on the Earth.”

A Dybbuk

The play is an adaptation of Sy Ansky’s 1920 Yiddish play concerning the marriage of Leah, the daughter of a wealthy man who has pledged her to the son of another wealthy family. Leah experiences anguish and frustration because her true love is a penniless Yeshiva student named Khonen. Leah secretly returns Khonen’s passion. When the father formally proclaims the appropriate husband for Leah, Khonen gets revenge by entering Leah’s body as a “dybbuk,” a Yiddish word meaning “a disturbed spirit” who takes possession of another’s body. The father turns in frustration to the revered Rabbi of Miropol for an exorcism. However, the father finds himself under judgment by the rabbinical court. Long ago, the father had promised Leah to Khonen, but his greed blinded him to Leah’s true desires when he tried to marry her to a rich young man. In the end, he pays for his vices by giving half of his wealth to the poor. Even the most unintended immoral act can have profound social consequences. The play tries to foreshadow the forthcoming evils of the Holocaust in the closing epitaph.

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Tony Kushner American Literature Analysis

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