Well, no one, until “Millennium Approaches” opened at the Royal National Theatre in London in 1992 to rave reviews. Later that year the entire seven-hour work opened at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. More raves. Kushner’s pleasantly nerdy face popped up in all the slick magazines. New York producers scrambled to corral the play. The off-Broadway Joseph Papp Public Theater was apparently the winner. But enter the mighty Shubert Organization, paladins of Broadway. Can’t beat those guys. Then suddenly here came Jujamcyn Theaters, unpronounceable but unbowed. They won the toughest theatrical tussle in years. George C. Wolfe, the hottest American theater director (“Jelly’s Last Jam”), was signed to stage the Broadway production. Robert Altman acquired the movie rights. Then “Millennium Approaches” was awarded the 1993 Pulitzer Prize. “Angels in America” is already the biggest event involving the gay movement in the history of American popular culture.
Tony Kushner was the right man in the right place at the right time, the “gay moment” that culminated in the massive March on Washington last month. “This is a classic moment of liberation,” says Kushner. “There has been a vast cultural shift that’s been happening for years. We’ve really kicked through a very big barrier. I think we’ve surprised everybody, including ourselves, by having gotten there. It’s going to be very difficult now to be unapologetically homophobic.”
Kushner’s epic (subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes”) is unapologetically bold in moving the theme of gay sensibility from the margin to the center of American culture. In following the fortunes of a gay couple (Joe Mantello and Stephen Spinella) ripped apart by betrayal when AIDS strikes, and a straight couple (Marcia Gay Harden and David Marshall Grant) who turn out not to be entirely straight, the play embraces politics, religion, sex, Mormons, Jews, blacks and WASPs. It leaps from Washington to Moscow, from the south Bronx to the South Pole, from earth to heaven. And it intersects with reality: the pivotal character is Roy Cohn (Ron Leibman), the McCarthyite lawyer who denied his homosexuality right up to his death from AIDS in 1986.
“Angels” goes far beyond the significant AIDS plays that have emerged recently: Larry Kramer’s “The Destiny of Me,” Paul Rudnick’s “Jeffrey,” William Finn’s “Falsettos.” The gay theme has captured the stage, but that stage (except for the musical “Falsettos”) is not on Broadway. “Angels,” not just the most ambitious effort by a gay playwright but a major vision of American complexities, gives Broadway one more chance to embrace the most challenging American theater.
Will it work? Hardheaded types like Bernard Jacobs, the gray eminence of the Shubert Organization, think it has a great shot. Jacobs and his partner Gerald Schoenfeld (a.k.a. The Shuberts) spoke with Gordon Davidson, boss of the Mark Taper Forum, and later with Kushner, and thought they had the play. But Kushner decided to go with Jujamcyn and its enterprising president Rocco Landesman, whose recent successes include “Jelly’s Last Jam” and the new smash “Tommy.”
Says Davidson: “The Shuberts went ballistic.” Davidson, who showed courage in being the first to produce all seven hours of “Angels in America,” explains that Kushner fell in love with Jujamcyn’s gem, the beautiful Walter Kerr Theatre. Some Broadway insiders say that what really happened is that Wolfe and Landesman were a package-Kushner couldn’t have one without the other. Jacobs will say only, “Gordon thinks Gerry and I are out to get him now. Not so. The name of the game is never to get mad.”
For producers the name of the game is to make money. But Landesman says: “Let’s face it, as a commercial proposition this doesn’t make any sense, two 3 1/2-hour plays on Broadway in one budget. We allocated $2.2 million for the two shows and we’ve already spent all that money on ‘Millennium.’ Now we have to come up with some more for ‘Perestroika.’ You have to say we’re crazy people.” But, he adds: “We pride ourselves on being a for-profit organization with a nonprofit soul. When we invest in a play or author we invest in a career.” Of course a guy could go schizo trying to appease his profit and nonprofit souls. Landesman tried to get Kushner to drop the play’s “Gay Fantasia” subtitle. “We worried that the subtitle might turn off heterosexuals who enjoy the show tremendously. But Tony felt this is what the play is and we should say that.”
Kushner, 36, is a figure of startling probity in showbizantine Broadway. His only previously produced original play was “A Bright Room Called Day,” about early Hitlerite Germany. A gay Jewish New Yorker raised in Cajun Louisiana, he says, “I always saw myself as someone from the left, on the margin, not someone likely to wind up on a Broadway stage. But I thought, ‘Do I really want to be a theater artist in America and never have been in a Broadway house?’ No, I don’t want that. Who knows if I’ll ever do anything that anyone wants to bring to Broadway again?”
Kushner is a rarity in the theater, a passionate intellectual who can turn ideas into crackling theater. He’s not afraid to turn his intensely searching gaze upon himself. “I believe that my sexual desire for men is normal,” he says. “But I think there are reasons, not necessarily good reasons, why I don’t find women sexually attractive and that bothers me.” And he adds, “I think I would be an awful person if I were straight. I’d be a great deal less aware of the suffering of others. I’d feel privileged, and privilege is a hard thing to let go of.”
The angel that crashes through the ceiling at the climax of “Millennium” is the perfect emblem for Kushner’s vision. “She’s the contradictory spirit of America,” he says. “She’s the angel of history. She’s the intermediary between the divine and the material world. She’s also the angel of theatricality. And yes,” he laughs, " she’s a human body in God-like drag." During the March on Washington, says Kushner, “there was a straight couple lying on the grass, and it was like everybody was looking and saying ‘Oh, is that what these people do?”’ The audiences, straight and gay, at “Angels in America” are seeing one another with a revelatory emotion that says: “Oh, so that’s what these people do. So that’s what we all do.”
