Understanding Tony Kushner (review)

Reviewed by: Understanding Tony Kushner Robert Vorlicky James Fisher. Understanding Tony Kushner. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008. Pp. 207. $39.95 (Hb). James Fisher is one of Tony Kushner’s most prolific critics. His notable Theater of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope was preceded and followed by numerous essays, production reviews, and edited collections focusing on Kushner. Fisher was named “Indiana Theatre Person of the Year” by the Indiana Theatre Association in 1997 for his direction of Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches at Wabash College. Most recently, Fisher published his edited collection, “We Will Be Citizens”: New Essays on Gay and Lesbian Drama, which includes his own essay [End Page 373] on the mainstreaming of gay drama vis-à-vis the unparalleled success of Angels. Fisher finds in the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series at the University of South Carolina Press an opportunity to reach both a broader audience and to speak more broadly about Kushner than in previous publications. The series, founded in 1985 by general editor Matthew J. Bruccoli (who died last year after shepherding close to fifty titles to publication), states that its mission is to provide instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers – identifying and explicating their material, themes, use of language, point of view, structures, symbolism, and responses to experience . . . Although the criticism and analysis in the series have been aimed at a level of general accessibility, these introductory volumes are meant to be applied in conjunction with the works they cover. (vii) Responding to this mission, the book’s opening chapter identifies phrases and ideas that strive to capture the essence of Kushner’s artistry. In the next four chapters – discussing A Bright Room Called Day (1985), Hydriotaphia, or The Death of Dr. Browne (1986), Angels in America (1991–92), Homebody/Kabul (2001), and Caroline, or Change (2003) – Fisher repeats these phrases and ideas throughout. The result links compositions together but inadequately explores the ways in which the writings function independently of one another. His methodology, too, seems to stem from the series’ commitment to “instruct” readers on how to read Kushner in order to understand resonances between his texts. References to “American lyric realism” (especially in the hands of Tennessee Williams) and “Brechtian technique,” for example, appear as the essential lenses through which to appreciate Kushner’s plays. While these influences are unquestionable (and are indeed instructional in “understanding Kushner”), their application from play to play – at the expense of other critical, theoretical perspectives – tends to dilute the intricate layering of Kushner’s techniques, themes, tropes, and theatricalities. Yet the book is filled with many striking moments, particularly when the critic engages the originality, authority, and sheer brilliance of Kushner’s accomplishments. For example, Fisher reminds us of the indisputable significance of Angels: the play seized the conscience of a nation unravelling the connections among individual, community, and national identities amid the AIDS crisis. From Fisher’s perspective, Angels is the creation of an artist who lived truthfully and fully at the present moment of his culture’s pulsating centre. A decade later, as Fisher acknowledges, the artist tackled the timely crises of international tensions in Homebody/Kabul, which presents, in dramatic form, a less coherent, colliding chain reaction among global, national, community, and individual identities. Fisher is [End Page 374] generous in letting the playwright speak in his own words, as in the pause for reflection between his discussions of the two plays. America must, as Kushner puts it, “behave justly with the rest of the world” (71). “If we do that,” he goes on, “if we can tackle the question of our place in the world, we can begin the new century in a spirit of transformation and justice” (71). Positioning Kushner between and of two worlds – artist and citizen – allows the critic to address the driving forces and undeterred quests of Kushner the playwright and the man. Fisher brings to his analyses an invaluable knowledge of Kushner’s unpublished texts, knowledge that highlights connections rarely noted in previous studies. (I look forward to a future study that looks even more closely at the earliest of Kushner’s writings, including The Age of Assassins [1982], The Protozoa...

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