Just Say No opened off-Broadway in October on the eve of the 1988 presidential election. The first-rate cast included the expertly droll Kathleen Chalfant as Mrs. Potentate, the Nancy Reagan character. The show had a successful run, in part because Reagan’s vice president, the first George Bush, defeated the Democrat, Michael Dukakis, and people needed to purge their grief. But the reviews were almost all bad. Mel Gussow in the Times compared Kramer unfavorably to Charles Ludlam and added that “having written the script and articulated his hostilities, perhaps Mr. Kramer should have put the play in his bottom desk drawer.”
The consensus was that Kramer was better at politics than theater. Nevertheless, there is a lot of theater in his politics. This became clear the following year when St. Martin’s published Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist, a collection of his polemical pieces. Kramer framed each piece with remarks on how it came to be written and its effectiveness. This made his tirades and attacks seem less wild and more controlled, more like dramatic monologues performed by a character named Larry Kramer. The book showed him trying different voices, including sermons in the style of Martin Luther King. It humanized him, at least for people who weren’t worn out by Kramer or hadn’t been personally attacked by him.
Ed Koch was no longer mayor, but he still lived in New York. He remained in the public eye—he was named Honorary Chair of GMHC, which infuriated many. Then he moved into 2 Fifth Avenue, the same big apartment building where Kramer lived. There’s a story that Kramer regularly confronted Koch in the lobby until Koch took out a peace order prohibiting Kramer from speaking to him. Kramer found a way around the restriction by talking to his dog whenever the ex-mayor was in earshot: “Molly, that’s the man who murdered so many of Daddy’s friends.”
Kramer resumed work on his novel, now expanded and titled The American People, a mix of autobiographical fiction, history, and historical fiction. But he missed theater and returned to another unfinished play, a companion piece to The Normal Heart about the past and future of Ned Weeks. It was called first The Furniture of Home, then The Tyranny of Blood, and finally The Destiny of Me. (The title is from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”)
Staying in a hospital for an experimental procedure to cure AIDS, Ned Weeks enters a long fantasy conversation with his younger self. Kramer was able to incorporate material cut from Normal Heart as well as explore what had happened since he left GMHC. The scenes with his father, mother, and brother are very strong, their endless exchanges of blame and guilt achieving real power. The present-day story is less effective: demonstrators chant outside the hospital; the experimental treatment fails; Ned and the doctor scream at each other; and Ned throws bags of blood against the floor, just as he threw a carton of milk at the end of Heart. He can’t be saved by medicine, politics, or the love of other people. The play ends with Ned and his younger self singing a love song to each other: “Make Believe” from Showboat.
The play opened in October 1992 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre on Christopher Street in a first-rate production with an excellent cast. Piper Laurie was the mother, Peter Frechette the brother, Jonathan Hadary was Ned, and the amazing John Cameron Mitchell (years before he wrote and performed Hedwig and the Angry Inch) was young Ned. It received good reviews and had a successful run.
Shortly before The Destiny of Me opened, Kramer met Gore Vidal. He was ostensibly interviewing Vidal for a new gay weekly, QW, over dinner at the Plaza Hotel. Vidal was back in the States to promote Live from Golgotha, his uneven satire about ancient Christianity and modern media. But an encounter between these two world-class monologuists could not help being problematical.
“He is very fat,” Kramer declares in his introductory remarks. He nags Vidal for ordering a steak, then tells us, “He is one of my heroes and, like me, he’s obviously very tired…. I identify with him completely. Who has listened to him? What has his wrath made right?” Kramer seems to think he is interviewing himself. But that doesn’t stop him from hectoring Vidal for not talking about AIDS, for not calling himself gay, and for not making Lincoln gay in his 1984 best-selling novel.
LK: There has been talk in gay historical circles that maybe Lincoln had some sort of gay relationship.
GV: I’m fairly convinced of it, yeah.
LK: Well, isn’t it important that this be written about?
GV: Yeah, but you see, I wasn’t covering that period of his life…
LK: But who better to tell the world than you?
GV: If I’d been writing about the young Lincoln I would’ve done it, but I’m writing about the Presidency during the Civil War.
LK: But I want you to write about the young Lincoln! Who better to tell the world than Gore Vidal? It would be ten times more useful than attacking the Constitution, to tell this fucking country that its most beloved President was gay, or had a gay period in his life.
Worn down by Kramer, the suavely articulate creator of Myra Breckinridge grows gruff and irritable. It is one of those rare occasions where the reader actually feels sorry for Gore Vidal.
V
The Nineties and After
19. Angels
At first the new decade did not look so different from the old one. The Republicans still occupied the White House. The AIDS epidemic deepened and hardened, growing more familiar and less shocking even as it killed larger numbers of Americans.
More gay books and plays continued to be written, but nothing so strong that it broke through to a wider public. Then a brilliant new playwright arrived, someone with remarkable verbal and imaginative powers, and the desire to include everything in his work: gay life, straight life, politics, anger, comedy, fantasy, and religion. He won the attention of the culture at large and, stranger still, he did it on Broadway in a single play that appeared in two parts and was seven hours long.
Tony Kushner was an excitable, fast-talking, wire-haired man in his thirties with lively eyes framed in various glasses and a tall body that waxed and waned depending on where he was in the writing process—he tended to binge during first drafts and diet afterward. He was born in New York in 1956, the son of two classical musicians, a clarinetist father and bassoonist mother; he had a younger brother who became a horn player and a deaf older sister who became a painter. The family moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana, a small city of sixty thousand with a Jewish community of one hundred families, so the father could work in the family lumber business. It was not a happy household. The parents missed their musical careers; the mother tried other arts, including acting—her son saw her in local productions of Death of a Salesman and The Diary of Anne Frank—before she was stricken with cancer in 1969. She was successfully treated, but the treatments left her exhausted and unable to return to acting or music.
The father recognized early that his middle child might be gay and sent him to a therapist at sixteen hoping to make him straight. “I wouldn’t want to be the father of Tchaikovsky,” he said. The boy would find psychoanalysis useful for the rest of his life.
Kushner came to New York to attend Columbia University and majored in, of all things, medieval studies, a realm of religion, allegory, plagues, and prophets. He wanted to write but was afraid he wasn’t good enough—his father taught him there was no point in doing art if you were going to be second-rate. He fell in love with theater in New York, seeing a wide variety of work, including Richard Foreman’s production of The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, which he saw many times. He entered NYU’s graduate program in directing in 1984, thinking directing would be easier than writing. He began to write chiefly to give himself plays to direct.
Like several other writers here, he was a late bloomer sexually: he did not go to bed with a man until he was twenty-one. His first boyfriend was Mark Bronnenberg, a classmate and actor in his theater troupe. (He would dedicate the first part of his most famous work to Bronnenberg, “my former lover, my forever friend, my safe haven and my favorite homosexual.”) Kushner also came late to gay literature in
his reading. He would eventually write smart, generous introductions to The Boys in the Band, The Normal Heart, and the plays of Charles Ludlam, but, in a long list of favorite writers he put together for Baltimore’s Center Stage in 1994, the only modern gay authors he included were Tennessee Williams and the poets Adrienne Rich and Thom Gunn.
Poetry was always important to Kushner: it electrified his imagination and fed his playwriting. He wrote an occasional poem himself, including “The Second Month of Mourning,” a powerful poem about his mother, who suffered a relapse of cancer and died in 1991.
You, or
the loss of you.
Now what kind of choice
is that?
You, or
the loss of you.
And what if the rock can’t be budged?
And what if never again the free flow of air?
And now you are the loss of you.
Different as they are, one can’t help thinking of “Kaddish,” the poem that Allen Ginsberg wrote about the death of his mother.
One of Kushner’s most important relationships during this period was with another theater colleague, a woman, Kimberly Flynn. They shared books and plays and endless conversations about art and politics. They even lived together for a time. Kushner has said Angels can be read as an intellectual history of their friendship, but it also includes some buried emotional history. An accident in a New York taxi left Flynn crippled for an extended period; Kushner feared he was abandoning her when he took a directing job in St. Louis. He was able to imagine the worst with those fears a few years later in his portrait of a gay man abandoning a sick lover.
His first success was with a very free adaptation of a play by seventeenth-century French playwright Pierre Corneille, The Illusion. A father goes to a magician to learn what’s happened to his estranged son. The magician shows him scenes of the son’s life, episodes of adventure and romance that end in the son’s murder. The father is heartbroken. Then he learns the son is an actor and the scenes are all make-believe. In a bitter, realistic twist, the father decides that since his son is well, he doesn’t need to visit him after all. (By this time Kushner and his father had not yet made peace with each other.)
Kushner’s first original work was a wildly ambitious play, A Bright Room Called Day, set in Berlin both during the rise of Hitler and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A Jewish-American woman, Zillah, stays in an apartment in 1990 that was the home of a circle of anti-Nazi friends in 1933: their ghosts still haunt the place. Bright Room is, among other things, a corrective to Cabaret. The musical and the movie (but not Isherwood’s stories) imply that Hitler came to power because all the good folks were too busy going to nightclubs to notice what was happening. Kushner shows something very different: a handful of theater people fighting Hitler by working for the left. A series of slides with Brecht-like titles, historical notes, and election results show how the rise of the left frightened the middle class into the arms of the Nazis. It was a no-win situation for German anti-Fascists—the Devil himself appears at the end of Act One. Yet this bleak but sophisticated history lesson was missed by many when the play opened in January 1991, on the eve of the First Iraq War. All they heard was one of the breathless monologues delivered to the audience by Zillah.
The problem is we have a standard of what evil is, Hitler, the Holocaust—THE standard of absolute evil…. But then everyone gets frantic as soon as you try to use the standard, nothing compares, nothing resembles—and the standard becomes unusable and nothing qualifies as Evil with a capital E…. I mean like a certain ex-actor-turned-president who shall go nameless sat idly and I do mean idly by and watched tens of thousands die of a plague and he couldn’t even bother to say he felt bad about it, much less try to help… I mean do you have to pile up some magic number of bodies before you hit the jackpot and rate a comparison with you-know-who?
It’s a brilliant, damning observation: when Hitler is the ultimate measure of evil, then most bad guys look good. But that wasn’t how Frank Rich, theater critic for the Times, heard the speech. “Perhaps if the world were not actually on the brink of war,” his review began, “A Bright Room Called Day, a fatuous new drama about a world on the brink of war, would not be an early frontrunner for the most infuriating play of 1991. But then again, is the time ever right for a political work in which the National Socialism of the Third Reich is trivialized by being equated with the ‘national senility’ of the Reagan era?” People change—even theater critics—and by the time of the Second Iraq War in 2002 Rich was no longer a drama critic but a political columnist and as skeptical of war presidents as Kushner had been.
Kushner included one gay character in Bright Room: Baz, a depressed young man who works for the Institute of Human Sexuality, which Isherwood himself frequently visited. Baz is accepted by his friends and his sexuality is a matter of small importance. But Kushner’s next play would be full of homosexuals. The author was placing gay life squarely at the center of things.
The new play was commissioned in 1988 by Oskar Eustis at the Eureka Theatre in San Francisco. It began as a two-hour work about five gay men, including a married Mormon and the infamous Roy Cohn, who had just died of AIDS. A few years earlier Kushner had had a dream about a sick friend where an angel crashed through the friend’s ceiling. Kushner wrote a poem about it called “Angels in America.” He never looked at the poem again, but used the title for the new play. He didn’t know what would happen in it. At one point he thought it might be a musical.
It grew as he wrote and continued growing. Soon it had a subtitle, A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, echoing the subtitle of George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House: A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes. Kushner loves ideas as much as Shaw did, but he drew upon a wide range of other sources: Bertolt Brecht again, the Book of Mormon, Karl Marx, and The Wizard of Oz. As Mike Nichols later said, “For the first-rate artist, there’s a moment when he’s really getting revved up, and the time just flows into him. It only happens once. It happens without his awareness at all. He planned nothing. He was just going ahead doing his next thing.”
One cannot really describe the dense weave of plots in Angels in a single paragraph, but here goes nothing: When a gay man, Prior, is diagnosed with AIDS, his bookish lefty lover, Louis, panics and abandons him. Guilty Louis becomes involved with Joe, a closeted gay Mormon lawyer with an unhappy, pill-popping wife, Harper. Joe is being courted for political work by Roy Cohn—Cohn, too, is sick with AIDS. Joe’s Mormon mother, Hannah, comes to New York to save his marriage. Prior’s friend Belize, a black male nurse, does what he can to save Prior. As if this weren’t rich and complicated enough, many of the characters have dreams and visions. Cohn dreams of Ethel Rosenberg, whom he sent to the electric chair. Harper dreams of Prior, whom she’s never met. And Prior has visions: first of ghosts and then of an angel—an angel who crashes through his ceiling and promises to tell him Everything.
The scope of the play is enormous: a panorama of different individuals all striving to repair their moral failures with politics and religion. Their world is stricken by AIDS, which releases still more demons. It resembles the millennial landscape of The Seventh Seal, also set during a plague—Kushner’s time in medieval studies paid off—yet the play could not be more American. Mark Twain called the Book of Mormon “chloroform in print,” but it’s also our own homegrown visionary religion, William Blake and Revelations translated to a world of cowboys and Indians. Kushner brings together two Chosen People, Mormons and Jews; both migrant nations prove to be equally, fiercely American.
This unwieldy epic is kept airborne with short, rapid-fire scenes, aria-like monologues, cockeyed poetry, and surprising comedy. Kushner had a liberating love of camp, which had been fed by his discovery of the Theater of the Ridiculous when he first came to New York. (Kushner wrote of Charles Ludlam: “He sees how ridiculous the world is… and look out! He sees through you, he’s learned your secret, he knows what you hope no one has noticed, that you
too are ridiculous.”) His use of comedy is always serious. His jokes spring naturally out of the situation, catch the audience off guard, and always add to the discussion. Here’s Prior and Harper meeting for the first time in his dream and her drug hallucination.
Harper: I never drink. And I never take drugs.
Prior: Well, smell you, Nancy Drew.
Harper: Except Valium.
Prior: Except Valium; in wee handfuls.
Harper: It’s terrible. Mormons are not supposed to be addicted to anything. I’m a Mormon.
Prior: I’m a homosexual.
Harper: Oh! In my church we don’t believe in homosexuals.
Prior: In my church we don’t believe in Mormons.
In addition to comedy, the play is carried by Kushner’s gift for fantasy. This is not a naturalistic play, but one of dreams and visions. It frequently breaks free of box-set realism—it builds, in fact, to a visit to heaven. Like James Merrill in his Ephraim poems, Kushner uses the spirit world to expand his storytelling vocabulary; the two writers use similar grammars of poetic escape. Each fantasy comes out of a particular character’s pain and need; there’s always a psychological truth to what they imagine. Yet the episodes do not remain simply dreams but have broader, more mysterious resonances. As with Merrill, we often suffer the poignant wish that Kushner’s fantasies were true.
Kushner also has a real talent for creating character. All the roles are good, but one in particular is so strong that it wins over even people who resist the rest of the play.
Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America Page 31