TONY KUSHNER DAY IN MINNEAPOLIS

In a fine profile of perhaps our greatest living playwright (well, how old is Sam Shephard anyway? Pinter's gone and Tracey Letts is still building...), Jeremy McCarter tries to get Tony Kushner to sit still for long enough to respond to a few questions. Kushner was in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where the Guthrie Theatre has launched a two-month celebration of his work, including the world premiere of "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism, With a Key to the Scriptures".

Critics have already complained that this new work feels unfinished and raw, and for good reason: Kushner was frantically trying to complete the play up until the very moment it had to be staged. "I'm in a very peculiar cycle right now," he told McCarter a couple of weeks before the curtain was scheduled to go up. "I'm working all day long, every day. I didn't sleep last night at all." Despite some controversy over heavy-hitting critics being barred at the door, there are plans to move the play to Broadway in spring 2010. Kushner concedes that he has quite a lot of rewriting to do. ("Now I have to pull it all together," he told McCarter after watching the play in front of an audience.)

The most amusing part of the piece might be at the beginning, in a description of the nebbishy New York playwright's response to the hoopla of "Tony Kushner Day", a kickoff ceremony for Minnesota's Kushnerphilia. After humbly receiving a proclamation from the mayor, Kushner told the crowd: "I have, I guess, another 11 hours left of Tony Kushner Day... Then I'll go back to wishing I was David Mamet."

~ EMILY BOBROW

Picture credit: Joan Marcus