Tony Kushner advice

[Broadway Matt]

Posted: 10/11/04 at 1:26pm

i plan to churn out a few midterm papers today, and I'd love a little advice/experiences about Tony Kushner's lesser-known plays.

basically a simple paper, but I can't even begin until I make a decision. I need to pick any Tony Kushner play that we haven't covered in class (all we've covered is Angels) and do a full textual and structural analysis and comparison with Perestroika.

I'm not too worried since I could write for days on Angels In America alone, but I'd love some suggestions for the other play if anyone here has read much Kushner. I'd planned on using Homebody/Kabul like everyone else but it'd be cool to be able to do one of his other plays. before I go spending more money i can't spare at the bookstore, please enlighten me as to which of his plays strike you as worth reading and considering for the focus of this paper. also any that just wouldn't be worth looking at for this. thanks in advance friends!

[robbiej]

Posted: 10/11/04 at 1:36pm

Do yourself a favor and get BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY. Although many reviewers thought it was just a polemic, I think it's a terrific piece.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 10/11/04 at 1:41pm

SLAVS! is an excellent short (for Kushner) play that was the next work of his produced in New York after Angels In America. I saw it at New York Theatre Workshop back in 1994 and in some ways it's a companion piece to Angels -- an 80 minute exploration of the themes the Oldest Living Bolshevik talks about in his speech that opens PERESTROIKA (that character is featured in SLAVS!). It deals with the death of the Soviet Union and the old order of leaders and asks, what's next? Very funny, but also quite powerful -- it won the Obie for Best Play that year. If you have to write a paper comparing one of his other plays to PERESTROIKA, then SLAVS is the obvious choice.

Updated On: 10/11/04 at 01:41 PM

[SueleenGay]

Posted: 10/11/04 at 2:01pm

I agree with Margo. SLAVS is a perfect piece to use.

Updated On: 10/11/04 at 02:01 PM

[Broadway Matt]

Posted: 10/11/04 at 2:07pm

bless all your hearts for replying with useful info! i was expecting maybe half a reply suggesting caroline or change and not much else.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 10/11/04 at 2:41pm

I know (and have seen) pretty much all of Kushner's work. All of it is worth reading/seeing/studying, so knock yourself out at the library (the short plays are especially interesting). However, for the purposes of your specific assignment, I'd really focus on SLAVS! -- it's a very meaty and dense 80 minute play (with more ideas than 99% plays twice as long) that would really lend itself to an analytical paper, and of all of his full length plays would be most interesting to contrast with PERESTROIKA.

You might also read through "Tony Kushner in Conversation" (a collection of interviews with Kushner on various topics) and "The Theater of Tony Kushner" by James Fisher, a collection of essays and critical studies of all of his plays (there are several pages of analysis of "Slavs!" if I remember correctly).

[robbiej]

Posted: 10/11/04 at 2:44pm

SLAVS! was only 80 minutes when you saw it???

Maybe that was the problem when I saw it. The production was about 2 1/2 hours.

BRUTAL!

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 10/11/04 at 3:15pm

I remember it being much less than two hours with no intermission -- my friends and I remarked at the time that maybe Slavs! was an extra act of Angels in America that Wolfe made him cut. Very early on, Angels was a 12+ hour piece -- though it was never performed at that length -- that Kushner, with the help of Oskar Eustis of Eureka Theatre in SF and others, finally cut down to seven hours. My friends and I joked at the time that Kushner could make a whole career out of refashioning the five or six hours of extra material into two or three other normal-sized full length plays.

Updated On: 10/11/04 at 03:15 PM

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 10/11/04 at 3:35pm

Just found this in the Village Voice review of the original 1991 Eureka Theatre production of Angels In America (where Millenium was completed and fully staged, but Perestroika was still a work-progress):

"The second play, Perestroika, is dominated more by Prior and the Angel and departs almost entirely from what little semblance of naturalism the work had previously clung to. For one thing, we are suddenly greeted with a crew of Politburo denizens (including Aleksii Antedeiluvianovich Prelapsarionov, the world's oldest Bolshevik), who begin each of the play's five acts with a scene of comic cacophony that somehow recalls both Chekhov's vaudevilles and Robert Wilson's knee plays. [Note: these scenes were cut from Angels in America and became part of a subsequent Kushner play called Slavs!]"

I also found reviews of a couple of productions of SLAVS! and each one mentioned a 90 minutes running time.
http://www.donshewey.com/theater_reviews/angels_in_america.html

[Broadway Matt]

Posted: 10/11/04 at 3:43pm

might SLAVS be found in one of Kushner's books containing his short plays? i'm not seeing a standalone published printing.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 10/11/04 at 3:47pm

It's in:

"Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness: Essays, a Play, Two Poems, and a Prayer"
by Tony Kushner
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/155936100X/qid=1097523953/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_2_1/103-2102113-0065426

Updated On: 10/11/04 at 03:47 PM

[Broadway Matt]

Posted: 10/11/04 at 4:10pm

thank ya!