Theater

How is Tony Kushner’s New Play?

Benjamin Brantley says Guide is overly pedantic.

Playwright Tony Kushner is at the center of a controversy, again, after CUNY blocked him from receiving an honorary degree due to political opinions on Israel. But what about his new play, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures? Benjamin Brantley writes in The New York Times that, despite the play’s stellar performances, “the most important conversation that’s happening in this play isn’t among its characters; it’s between Mr. Kushner and a vast library of political theory and world drama.” The play is set in the living room of a Brooklyn brownstone, and it tackles the same question as Kushner’s most famous play, Angels in America: “How do we live when the old systems of belief and morality that gave form to our existence have fallen apart or proved empty?” Unfortunately, this time, the answer may not keep you in your seat: Brantley writes that Kushner “registers mainly as a great conversationalist who keeps talking well after he has made his essential points.”