Yes, Tony Kushner's latest play clocks in at nearly four hours, but many other contemporary playwrights writing in the now-popular 90-minute mode could extract at least five plays from what Kushner has written, making Kushner's effort, relatively speaking, a streamlined affair.
Berkeley Rep is presenting its first post-New York production, with a new director, a new cast, and significant revisions by Kushner (whose Angels in America was born in San Francisco). It is a technologically complex, emotionally wrenching, intellectually stimulating, and thematically unwieldy play that finds fulfilling life under Tony Taccone's direction at Berkeley Rep.
The play's title certainly doesn't stint on word count: The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures. But that can only suggest part of the stories of this colliding family, some of which do involve economic dialectics and theological studies. Among those that don't, at least specifically, is the saga of a gay couple whose 26-year relationship is challenged by one of the men's expensive addiction to a Yale-educated hustler. And then there is the unfaithful partner's sister, whose own partner is pregnant from sperm donated by their younger brother, and who beds her ex-husband while her spouse is having contractions in the same house.
That house is very much a character in the play, a large Brooklyn brownstone that has been the Marcantonio family's anchor for decades even if most of the offspring have moved far away. When the clan is summoned by patriarch Gus, they are almost as disturbed at his announcement that he is selling the house as by the fact that he is planning on liquidizing himself as well as the homestead. And here is where the parts of the title that invoke economic theories come most into play �" mainly revolving around the positives and negatives promulgated by labor unions, and the quasi-religious experience they once gave to their most ardent adherents.
Gus is an old-time union activist and a standing member of the shrinking U.S. Communist Party, and his reasons for wanting to kill himself at age 72 are fluid and not completely honest at the start. Alzheimer's is his initial rationale, but little that he says or does suggest that as a valid reason. Gradually more honest explanations emerge, and valid or not, his family cannot abide his choice. That tension unleashes conflicts already facing his offspring and their spouses, whose dramas play out both separately and in the verbal group brawls that may be the most intriguing/frustrating aspect of the play.
Multiple sub-arguments compete for attention in these rancorous scenes, and you soon realize you cannot possibly follow them all. That can be frustrating, but what happens is that you variously tune in to different moments of the different confrontations, and nobody in the audience is going to have exactly the same experience. And while the concurrent arguments competing for our attention are deadly serious, Kushner clearly wants to have some fun with the chaotic situation as well.
Most everyone in the cast of 11 has equal prominence as the story plays out in multiple scenes and various locations. But the reason that they are all drawn together at this moment is Gus, the suicidal paterfamilias, and the quietly charismatic Mark Margolis delivers the difficult combination of convincing elderliness with the assuredness of an actor not hindered by age. As his daughter Empty (an unsubtle nickname derived from the initials of her given name Maria Teresa), Deirdre Lovejoy gives vivid life to the character whose position as her father's favorite becomes a moral burden while she also deals with her unmaternal feelings about her partner's pregnancy.
Lou Liberatore and Jordan Geiger project the uneasy erotic-affectionate-monetary relationship between, respectively, Gus' older son Pill and his hustler-companion Eli. And while Tyrone Mitchell Henderson provides a kind of uptight comic relief as Pill's husband Paul, we never get to see beyond the character's rigid anger to that place that had made Pill and Paul such an enduring couple. There isn't room to go into the considerable contributions of the other cast members, except to note the wonderfully deadpan performance by Randy Danson as Gus' sister and the chilling impression made by Robynn Rodriguez in a single scene as the widow of one of Gus' union buddies, with her inadvertent revelations and her tutorial on painless suicide.
When the final curtain descends, the dominant reaction is more quizzical than resolute for both the characters and for us. Kushner doesn't pretend to have answers to the dilemmas he creates, but there are few playwrights better than Kushner at creating messy lives with such clarity.
The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures will run at Berkeley Rep through June 29. Tickets are $29-$99. Call (510) 647-2949 or go to berkeleyrep.org.