Wrestling With Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner
Directed by Freida Lee Mock
'P.O.V.' Series
PBS
Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2007

 

                                                                         Photo courtesy of AFF/ Sanders & Mock via PBS

Toward the beginning of Freida Lee Mock's excellent if somewhat fawning documentary profile of playwright Tony Kushner, she films him in June 2002 addressing the graduating class of Vassar with his characteristically rousing humor and poignancy.

"This is a time of crisis, and in a time of crisis we all have to focus on getting real," he tells the graduating seniors. "And you? What do you do? You get a playwright to deliver the 2002 commencement speech. Thank you for inviting me, but I worry about you. . . . Why someone from the theater, for God's sake? Do you want everyone to think you're gay? What am I doing here is, I guess, my question, and one of the answers ought to be, I am here to be political. I am here to be a citizen in a pluralist democracy. Why you? Because the world will end if you don't act. Will the world end if you act? Who can say? Will you lose your soul, your democratic citizen soul, if you don't act? I guarantee it. So commence already. . . . I am certain you are aflame. Hurry hurry hurry. Now now now. The world is waiting for you. The world needs you desperately. Organize. Speak the truth. Thanks."

There's a little more to it, but not much -- that's almost his whole speech. The students look amused and puzzled and apprehensive in the reaction shots -- but ultimately charmed. Maybe that's selective editing. But this is Kushner they're listening to, so maybe it's not.

And it's a very clever way for Mock to introduce to us this riddle inside an agony wrapped in a punch line, this Pulitzer-winning, feverishly creative, insanely productive artistic original who with many works, but particularly his Angels in America, thwacked the dramatic world in its gut, then gave it a hug, and left it feeling strangely better for the experience. It's a clever scene because the commencement address, in just a few minutes, embodies the odd blend of amiability and outrageousness, casual idiom and transcendent preoccupation, artistic rectitude and populist impulse that have defined Kushner's career and seem to define his personality too.

Mock, who previously directed Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision, also for the Emmy-winning 'P.O.V.' series, now in its 20th year, follows Kushner in a low-key, fly-on-the-wall way from shortly after 9/11 through the 2004 Broadway debut of his musical Caroline, or Change, written with composer Jeanine Tesori, who also wrote the score for this program. Mock includes some interviews, including many with Kushner himself. But for the most part she and her crew follow him around, visit with him in his New York apartment, and give a deep sense of his winning ways with people but, more important, the constant emergence of his ideas, which evidently beam from him the same marvelous but manic way market insights must beam from successful hedge-fund managers.

There are the high-profile projects, but also some smaller ones like a coedited anthology on writings about Zionism, and the libretto for a drama-dance-klezmer-music performance about his immigrant grandmother. There are the cameos by the Meryl Streeps and Marcia Gay Hardens in his life, but also the nervous walks in Central Park before an opening night, during which, by the way, he is not in the theater, but chowing down at a nearby Chinese restaurant. We are guests at his wedding, and even follow him on a visit to his fat counselor. (Apparently Angels was written with one part inspiration, one part perspiration, and two parts Entenmann's chocolate-chip cookies.)

If you don't already have a good sense of Kushner's work, Wrestling With Angels won't give you one. It's an intimate portrait for the already in the know or, perhaps, the curious to know more. And what's clearly missing from the film are any critical voices, even the mild sort of complaints we read in the mixed reviews that are frequently alluded to but never quoted. Kushner is brilliant and unique and invaluable, in my humble opinion. I don't think too many folks have failed to notice that his work is also sometimes self-indulgent, and talky, and that, even when it's at its most poetic, its center of gravity is politics and not entertainment. Its risks are glorious and bold; but they don't always pay off dramatically. How could they?

In the right mood, I love that; in the wrong mood, I have to wait for the right mood to be able to attend to the big ideas he tries to cram into our heads. Mock should have at least nodded to those realities. That she didn't makes this sermon, though eloquent, one for the choir.


The documentary is divided into four "acts."

"Act 1: Citizen of the World," observes Kushner during the premiere of his play, Homebody/Kabul, which, just after 9/11, depicted a self-destructive Englishwoman's journey to Afghanistan. The play, written before the twin towers were destroyed, received mixed reviews, but despite a bumpy commercial opening was produced again in London, L.A., Seattle, and Berkeley.

"Act 2: Mama, I'm a Homosexual, Mama" follows him to his hometown of Lake Charles, La., where he and his musician brother visit their old house and their dad and recount their improbably joyful childhoods growing up Jewish, liberal, and, in Tony's case, gay in the deep South. They speak and play at their father's birthday celebration, visit their old synagogue and the old family lumber business. From Louisiana, Kushner went to Columbia University, where he studied Medieval history, worked at his painting and writing, and came out to his parents and the world. He came to the attention of Oskar Eustis, then director of San Francisco's Eureka Theater, and Eustis commissioned what became the seven-hour Angels in America, A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, which opened in 1991 at the Eureka and on Broadway in 1993.

"Act 3: Collective Action to Overcome Injustice," shows Kushner the juggler. First Kushner is in Chicago working with Maurice Sendak on a reconstruction of the children's opera Brundibar, which the Nazis staged with child performers at Theresienstadt as a propaganda project. Mock's there-but-not presence captures Sendak being thanked by Ela Weissberger, an original Brundibar performer who survived. Then Kushner is back in New York, working with the creators and cast of Caroline, or Change, a quirky but memorable musical about a Jewish, suburban boy in Louisiana and his family's black maid. Watching the production come together, particularly the animated direction of the ubiquitous George C. Wolfe, is a real pleasure.

Caroline, too, is greeted with a mixed critical and commercial response, and in a telling sequence we see Kushner swallowing that disappointment after pouring five years into the play, regrouping, consulting with his friends and colleagues, and calling in some chits to get the word out about the show and get it back on its feet, capitalizing on the saturation coverage at the time of HBO's Mike Nichols production of Angels. It's a revealing section of the film, because it reminds us that even iconic "successes" can get walloped, but that all those showbiz truisms about resiliance have some meat to them.

"I don't want to be ghettoized because of my politics, because I try to make stuff difficult -- people have an appetite for the difficult," he tells Mock as Kushner the playwright discovers Kushner the pushy producer. Cut to the Broadway opening in May, 2004.

An epilogue, "Action Can Change the Course of Things," follows him to Southwestern University in Texas, where he chats with students, and to Miami, where he helps get out the Democratic vote for the 2004 presidential election, an exercise in democracy that includes arguing with the desk clerk at a polling place in a senior center. Would he help that young woman voter by opening her baby carriage if a film crew weren't there? We venture a confident yes.

From there it's back to New York, where he's working on a new play, The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism of the Key to the Scriptures. Then there's the new musical, another collaboration with Tesori. And a play about "the British cotton industry and American slavery."

They sound difficult, no? But then we have an appetite for the difficult. Kushner says he feels guilty that he's not teaching, politicking, making more money. In the dusk or dawn (hard to tell) light of the last shot, as he taps away at his keyboard, he looks, understandably, a little overwhelmed. Like maybe he needs some words of encouragement.

Here are some, which I borrow from one of America's foremost playwrights: "I am certain you are aflame. Hurry hurry hurry. Now now now. The world is waiting for you. The world needs you desperately. Organize. Speak the truth. Thanks."