Tony Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures opened this evening at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. It was a most enjoyable evening. That is a bit of an odd thing to say about a play whose main character is hell-bent on suicide.
The play is set in a brownstone in Brooklyn in 2007. The patriarch, Gus Marcantonio (the excellent Mark Margolis) is a retired longshoreman, union organizer, and member of the Communist Party USA. He has two sons and a daughter, all grown. They have come home to try to keep Gus from killing himself. Recently he had slashed his wrists in the bathtub, but was rescued in time. The children are traumatized; they are trying to figure out why he did it and what is driving him to try it again. Each of them has their own issues. Pill (Lou Liberatore), the eldest son, is gay and married to Paul (Tyrone Henderson), but has cheated on Paul regularly with Eli (Jordan Geiger), a young male prostitute, using a large sum of money borrowed from his sister Empty (Deirdre Lovejoy). Empty was married to Adam (Anthony Fusco) but divorced him, although they occasionally have sex, and is now living with Maeve (Liz Wisan), who is pregnant after having sex with Gus’ younger son Vito (Joseph Parks). These multiple betrayals and ambivalences make for hilarious scenes of dysfunctionality as all cast members gather in the living room and shout at one another at the top of their lungs. This is how real family arguments take place, and it’s exhilarating to see it brilliantly performed onstage, without the strained theatrical artifice of having one character speak at a time. They each get off marvelous zingers at one another and no pretense is left unpunctured.
The play devotes several scenes to the relationship between Pill and Eli and Paul, and to the triangles between Empty and Maeve and Adam, and between Maeve and Vito and his wife Sooze. But the core of the drama is between Gus and his children. As a lifelong radical fighter for social change, Gus has been an ambivalent father. He tried to imbue his children with his Marxist philosophy but at the same time spare them the pain of the struggle. They also complain that he was often more dedicated to the revolution than to his role as father. None of the children turned out as anything resembling a clone of the old man. Empty (not a name I would have chosen; she is anything but void) abandoned medical school, studied nursing for a time, and then became a labor lawyer. She is fully consumed by struggles to improve labor legislation. Gus denounces her work as futile reformism that only strengthens the walls of the capitalist prison. Pill has become a public school history teacher and spouts Marxist theory but his lifestyle is dedicated to sex as a commodity, to the ruin of his relationships with his partner and with his sister. Vito works in construction and, apart from having had sex with Maeve, leads a conventional lifestyle, but his politics are right-wing, and he has nothing but contempt for his father’s radical history. So there is material here for numerous political and philosophical arguments. Kushner is a genius at scripting these ideological battles in an emotionally engaging, often very funny manner. Margolis brings to Gus a roaring, raging energy; he is the old lion baring his teeth, defying the hyenas who nip at his flanks. All of the cast members are superb, but Margolis rises above them, scene after scene.
Yet this lion wants to kill himself. Gus’ will to suicide is the central theme of the drama from beginning to end. When Empty finally confronts him at the kitchen table and absolutely demands that he explain himself, the best that Gus can do is to wave his arms at the monstrous powers of today’s capitalism (in 2007) and at the remoteness of Marx’s vision of a revolutionary proletariat. His daughter quite rightly responds that if that is a reason to die, then she also and everyone else should kill themselves, as the future is totally hopeless and living is pointless. The old man retreats into self-pity; he feels his fighting days are over, the Party is all but dead, the union is weak, and he is weighed down by past compromises and defeats. She tells him that by committing suicide he is betraying everything he ever fought for, and begs him to stay alive, at the very least, because she loves him and his suicide will break her heart.
With this plot setup, there are three possible endings: Gus kills himself, Gus decides to live, or the play ends with the question up in the air. I won’t give away the ending; go see it. It’s a delightfully entertaining play, totally engaging despite its more than three-hour length (with two intermissions). Anyone who has ever been touched by radical politics, or has a gay family member, or has a troubled parent or dysfunctional siblings, or a broken marriage — and that takes in a broad swath of the population — will find flashes of lightning in the play that strike very close to home.
I liked the play a great deal, but I do have some quarrels with it. Namely:
The title is a needless provocation and a feint. Although several of the characters are homosexual and have intense subplots, the core of the play has nothing to do with homosexuality or even sexuality; it has to do with life and death. There are wonderful flashes of insight about capitalism (not much about socialism) and hilarious digressions into theology, but this isn’t a didactic play, as the terms “guide” and “key” in the title suggest. You have to understand the title as a put-on, and that’s OK because it is primarily a comedy, although much of the subject matter, like in the very best comedies, is deadly serious. Still, a much shorter title wouldn’t hurt.
Gus is a towering figure, with an intellect that roams from classical antiquity to the 20th century. His father and his father’s father’s father were all revolutionaries of one stripe or another, and the past three generations were born and died in this Brooklyn brownstone. Gus’ announcement in the first act that he is selling the house is like a declaration that the revolutionary lineage is now finally extinct. But for all that seemingly historical vision, Gus is myopic; he thinks that the revolution is over because it did not happen in his lifetime. He recites from the first line of the Communist Manifesto: “the history of all hitherto existing societies is a history of class struggle,” but he does not understand a bit of it. History is longer than the lifetime of any individual. In any historic war there are periods of advance and periods of defeat and retreat. Only one year after the play takes place, capitalism underwent the profound shock of the 2008 financial crisis and its economic pillars teetered on the brink of collapse. Shortly after came the Occupy movement. Since then, every week brings new information about the impoverishment of the “middle class” — we could say, the proletarianization of the proletariat — and about the widening gaps of wealth, power, and advantage of which Marx presciently wrote, and Prof. Piketty’s book on Capital in the 21st Century is a best seller. History is not over yet. There isn’t any character in the play with a broader vision than Gus. Gus’s sister Clio (Randy Danson), who briefly joined the Tupamaros and then the Shining Path guerrillas in Peru, is drawn as a cartoon-like cult addict. That’s unfortunate because anyone who still belonged to the CPUSA in 2007, as Gus did, isn’t the brightest bulb in the Marxist chandelier.
Toward the end, a friend of Gus’s, Shelle, appears and gives Gus a kit with instructions for committing suicide. She used it when her husband, who was dying of ALS, wanted to end his suffering, and she implies that she is part of an organized network that assists in such cases. There are two problems here. One, Gus is not ill, and the organization that advocates self-deliverance, formerly called the Hemlock Society, now Compassion and Choices, would categorically never assist someone with Gus’ physically vigorous profile to end his life. Gus is not ill; he is a depressed and narcissistic old fool, a malade imaginaire, who is using the threat of his suicide to command the attention of his children. Two, the method that Shelle recommends, relying on pills, was even in 2007 generally recognized as ineffective for the purpose, and better methods exist. Just as on the topic of the death of Marxism, on the topic of assisted suicide the play is behind the times. The intelligent anysexual deserves an updated guide.
The final scene, in my opinion, does not work. This involves a rather strange and ambiguous encounter between two characters that is dramatically the lowest-voltage scene in the script. Dropping the final curtain after this fizzle cheats the cast of much of the rousing audience accolades that it deserves and that could have been had with a stronger finale.
These points aside, this is an outstanding evening of theatre. The staging is inventive and makes full use of the Rep’s awesomely powerful scene-shifting engines. There was a glitch with the lighting toward the end on opening night but otherwise the show is tightly produced, very together, up to the Rep’s creative and technical standards. Highly recommended.
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