Devils in the Details

Are there four more boring words in the English language than Tony Kushner's new play? If there are, I am sure he has written them as dialogue. I happened to catch him kvelling with Kurt Andersen over the weekend--I was in the garden, and I nearly stomped a tomato: Andersen makes some banal comparison between a bit of scripted crosstalk and a Twitter feed, and Kushner pushes his glasses up his nose and says, Well, I have never seen a Twitter feed, and then they both laugh, even though this suggests a playwright whose, ahem, political consciousness is frozen right around the opening scene of Bye Bye Birdie. The new play is called The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures, a title that makes a whalesong of anachronism. Is that 1989 calling on the landline? The whole thing suggests a 4-hour-long craiglist m4m post in which some dusty thirty-nine-year-old laments his invisibility to the shining abdominals at the gay bar, a complaint made all the more pathetic by his having totally missed the fact that these little Adonises are losers too, and all the cool gay kids, like their straight counterparts, are wearing bad moustaches and showing off their first season of chest hair. Well, the Intelligent Homosexual is some sort of cryptoarthurmiller thingamado in which an extended family--yes, a kitchen-sink extended family drama, yoy and double-yoy--gather together to confront Life In the Gloaming of Old Certainties. Talk about a one-trick pony. The idea of a fading world of theoretical certainty being supplanted by a schizo, dissipated modernity is like the power chord of serious drama. It fails both as history and prognostication; its modern times are a flawed prediction extrapolated from a past that never existed.