The Intelligent Homosexuals Guide:

Features

07.22.14

The articles provided in this report are for your personal information and use only. Note that this material may not
be publicly distributed, posted to any web site available to the public, or used for any promotional purpose
whatsoever without the express consent of the copyright owner.

Blogs
Search

TOP
BLOG
STORIES
Theater

30 Rock's
Cheyenne
Jackson Comes
to S.F. To...
By Laura Jaye
Cramer

Topless Turns
50: A Steamy Bite
of San...
By Irene Hsiao

Archie Andrews
1941-2014: A
Beloved Comic...
By David-Elijah
Nahmod

OkStupid: How to
Not Succeed on
OkCupid
By Jessica
Nemire

Cyclist
Challenges
Himself to S.F.'s
Steepest...
By Jessica
Nemire

Tourism For
Locals: Shreve &
Co. is S.F.'s...
By Juan De Anda

Now Trending

Tony Kushner Wrestles with Angels and Politics

in "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to
America's 10
StoryCorps:
Most with
Annoying a Key to the
Sharing
Capitalism and Socialism
Phrases and
Vignettes of
Words
American Life...
Scriptures"
By Mollie
By Jenny Singer
By Emily Wilson Wed., May 28 2014 at 8:00 AM McWilliams
Categories: Interview, Politics, Religion, TheaterSan Francisco

Comedian
Smokes "Crack"
in S.F. To See
How...
By Mollie
McWilliams

From
the
Vault

Ranks Fourth
Best City in
U.S.,...
By Mollie
McWilliams

The Exhibitionist
Like

1,735 people like The Exhibitionist.

Facebook social plugin

Slideshows
J-Pop Summit Festival

Kevin Berne

Mark Margolis (Gus), Tina Chilip (Sooze), and Joseph J. Parks (Vito) in The Intelligent
Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures,

Neptune Society Columbarium

Winner of two Tony Awards, three Obies, an Emmy and a Pulitzer Prize, Tony Kushner
probably remains best known for "Angels in America," his two-part epic play that involves
love, loss, Mormonism, Valium addiction, imaginary trips to the Antarctic, drag queens,
and characters from real life (including Roy Cohn, the chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy's
Senate investigations in the 1950s and Ethel Rosenberg, who was executed for treason).
And, of course, an angel.

GaymerX @ InterContinental

So it's no surprise that Kushner's latest play, at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre for its
West Coast premiere, "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism
with a Key to the Scriptures," (his husband nicknamed it "iHo") also features big ideas,
politics, religion, and lots and lots of argument in the story of three siblings whose father, a
communist retired longshoreman in Brooklyn, threatens to commit suicide.

More Slideshows >>

"There's a struggle in the play between despair and hope and between a belief in progress
and a belief in revolution at the center of it," Kushner said. "It's a family drama, and it's a
pretty unhappy family."
Kushner, who was out at the Berkeley Rep recently, getting ready for an afternoon
rehearsal, says people don't need to be experts on capitalism, socialism or scripture to
enjoy the play.
"You don't need to know anything at all," Kushner said. "If you just come and don't panic
and listen, you'll be fine. We've all worked very hard to make sure people are taken care
of."
Kushner, who wrote the screenplay for Lincoln (as well as Munich), not surprisingly
spends a lot of time thinking about politics, particularly left wing politics, and that comes
out in the play. That some leftists spend so much time criticizing the government rather
than putting their energy into tangible things like getting control of Congress frustrates
him. Kushner said:
"Unless you really have belief there is going to be some kind of revolution that
overturns the U.S. government and gives us something better, and no one who isn't
psychotic could really say that that's likely, we have to start to think about what the
fantasy of revolution is. I don't mean to belittle it by that. It's a dream and it has
immense power, and I hope this comes across in the play -- it's not dismissible and
it's not negligible, but in terms of a theoretical basis that guides us into action why
we don't recognize how often electoral processes and a functioning democratic
government has brought us to radical transformation is incomprehensible to me."
Tony Taccone, Berkeley
Rep's artistic director,
directs "iHo," and Kushner
said he has been enjoying
working again with his long
time collaborator who codirected of 1992's Angels in
America.
Kushner calls Taccone
fearless, openhearted and
open-minded with no
sentimentality. When he
and Taccone worked on the
children's opera,
"Brundibar," which was
originally performed in the
concentration camp
Terezn -- at the last minute
-- Kushner wrote a curtain
raiser about the smuggling
of the score into the camp.
Taccone made the decision
to go with it, something
most people would have
rejected as too risky,
Kushner said.
"We did it, and it was
Kevin Berne
fantastic," Kushner said.
Mark Margolis (Gus) and Deirdre Lovejoy (Empty)
"There's a part of him that
loves shutting his eyes and
holding his nose and jumping into space. Things like that, it's thrilling. So I love working
with him."

Introducing 2013-14: The Intelligent

Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and
Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures
from Berkeley Repertory Theatre

Whats going on here?

Some of your technology may be out of date, and this video
may not play properly.

Try Anyway

Introducing 2013-14: The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism

With a Key to the Scriptures from Berkeley Repertory Theatre on Vimeo.
"The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the
Scriptures" plays at the Berkeley Repertory's Roda Theatre (2015 Addison, Berkeley)
through June 29. Tickets are $29-$99. For more information, call (510) 647-2949 or visit
the theater's website.
For events in San Francisco this week and beyond, check out our calendar section. Follow
us on Twitter at @ExhibitionistSF and like us on Facebook.
Tags:Berkeley Rep, iHo, Tony Kushner, Tony Taccone
Email to Friend

Write to Editor

Print Article

We Recommend
Powered by Livefyre

ABOUT US

LOCAL

MOBILE

RSS

E-EDITION

ADVERTISING
MY ACCOUNT

CONNECT

ADVERTISING

COMPANY

LOG IN
JOIN

FACEBOOK
TWITTER
NEWSLETTERS

CONTACT US
NATIONAL
AGENCY SERVICES
CLASSIFIED

PRIVACY POLICY
TERMS OF USE
SITE PROBLEMS?

2014 SF Weekly, LP, All rights reserved.

SITE MAP

In searching the publicly accessible web, we found a webpage of interest and provide a snapshot of it
below. Please be advised that this page, and any images or links in it, may have changed since we created
this snapshot. For your convenience, we provide a hyperlink to the current webpage as part of our service.

Copyright

2006 Bay Area Reporter, a division of Benro Enterprises, Inc.

Tony Kushner's
complicated relationships
by Richard Dodds

Ever since Angels in America announced Tony Kushner as a playwright of enormous talent and even more daring, there have been followers
with a pressing desire. When would Kushner write another "gay" play? No creative artist wants to be pigeonholed or pressed to fulfill some
sort of quota, but Kushner said as far back as 1998 that he was "somewhat defensive" about that question.
In a recent phone interview from New York, en route to the airport for an SF-bound flight, he reaffirmed that it remains a hovering question
even if its intensity has abated since Angels was born in San Francisco in 1991 and went on to win just about every prize as it moved to
Broadway two years later. "People sort of gave up," he said of the "gay" play expectations as he continued writing on a diverse collection of
other subjects. "But I have heard from people who ask, 'When are you going to do your next play about us?' They think I've lost interest. I
hope not, but there are people who read it that way."
After all, Angels in America was subtitled A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and it placed the AIDS epidemic into a sprawling context of
intimate personal stories, national and international politics, historical ghosts, and even cosmic intervention. At the time, it was like a shot
across the bow of a society conflicted by its own health, history, and capacity for redemption. His latest play again gives titular billing to
those who may have wondered whither the gay Tony.
The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures opens
this week at Berkeley Rep, a safe haven for the playwright, who has taken a hands-on approach during
rehearsals at Rep's six preceding Kushner productions. "I guess I have a tendency to sort of label it
when something might be considered a gay play," he said. "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide, or IHo as we call it, is a gay play. I have no problem with that." It is the first so-labeled since Angels .
While acceding to a "gay play" label, and noting the fact that five of the 10 characters are gays or
lesbians whose complicated issues are intertwined with a suicidal patriarch's gathering of the clan, the
Homosexual title does not confer a particular LGBT imbalance to the central concerns of the play. As
for the title, it partly paraphrases George Bernard Shaw's The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism
and Capitalism with a kicker borrowed from a treatise by Christian Science founder Mary Baker
Eddy.
"The relationship of the title to the text is very literal," Kushner said. "If anyone can figure how this or
any play is a guide to something, you are probably watching a bad play. This play is a story that
contains the title rather than something that is described by the title." And partly, the title was just
Kushner having some fun.

Berkeley Rep Artistic Director

Tony Taccone, left, has a long
relationship with playwright Tony
Kushner, and is staging his newest
play. Photo: kevinberne.com

"I like Shaw as sort of an unapologetic champion of I wouldn't call it arrogance or elitism, because
Shaw really believed that stupidity is rarer than we think, that most people are intelligent even if they don't use their brains as well as they
should," he said. "And I liked the conjunction of LGBT politics and politics of the body and desire and love, and there's a kind of
complicated relationship between the brain and the rest of the body."

"Complicated relationship" is also an apt description of the Gus Marcantonio family, which includes his children, their spouses both current
and ex-, and, in one case, a rented sexual companion. They have regrouped at the Brooklyn home of Marcantonio, a former longshoreman,
labor leader, and socialist, in order to hear his reasons for killing himself and to decide what they should do with this information.
The character of Gus and his motivations have been a major focus of Kushner's rewrites since the play's New York production in 2011. "I
hope that it is now difficult when you watch the play to judge Gus. I didn't want to make him simply this guy who believed in this thing that
wasn't true, and now look what happened to him. There is a way in which he believes that his suicide is a political act that is in some way
an affirmation of the theories that have steered his life."
This may not sound much like a "gay" play, but three of his children are gay, each with a partner who is also in the play. "More than with
Angels, I think the story is genuinely held by different ones of four or five of the main characters. I think in most of my plays there is a kind
of battle over whose play it actually is."
Some of those characters include the oldest son, who is battling with his partner, most audibly
because he has been spending thousands of dollars for the company of a hustler who is also on the
scene. Some of that money was borrowed from his lesbian sister, nicknamed Empty, who had had
that money earmarked to help with the expenses soon to arrive along with her partner's baby, achieved
through artificial insemination from sperm donated by their younger brother.
"Empty is the child who is closest to Gus, and her partner is eight months along in a tricky pregnancy,
and she's suddenly faced with how to care for an actively suicidal parent, not to mention her exhusband, who is living with her father in a basement apartment," the playwright explained. "I don't
In Berkeley Rep's The Intelligent
Homosexual's Guide, Lou
Liberatore, left, and Jordan Geiger
portray lovers in the West Coast
premiere of Tony Kushner's latest
play. Photo: kevinberne.com

want to do any spoiling, but Empty is very much implicated in one of the aspects of Gus' intentions to
commit suicide. So it's all very tangled."
First seen at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis in 2009 and at New York's Public Theatre two years

http://www.ebar.com/common/inc/article_print.php?sec=theatre&article=1035
later, the play hadn't yet felt finished to Kushner when he got a call from Tony Taccone, Berkeley

Rep's artistic director, who also happened to have been running the Eureka Theatre when Angels in
America premiered there in 1991. "I was trying to figure out where next to do the play where I could do the work I knew I wanted to do,"

hope that it is now difficult when you watch the play to judge Gus. I didn't want to make him simply this guy who believed in this thing that
wasn't true, and now look what happened to him. There is a way in which he believes that his suicide is a political act that is in some way
an affirmation of the theories that have steered his life."
This may not sound much like a "gay" play, but three of his children are gay, each with a partner who is also in the play. "More than with
Angels, I think the story is genuinely held by different ones of four or five of the main characters. I think in most of my plays there is a kind
of battle over whose play it actually is."
Some of those characters include the oldest son, who is battling with his partner, most audibly
because he has been spending thousands of dollars for the company of a hustler who is also on the
scene. Some of that money was borrowed from his lesbian sister, nicknamed Empty, who had had
that money earmarked to help with the expenses soon to arrive along with her partner's baby, achieved
through artificial insemination from sperm donated by their younger brother.

In Berkeley Rep's The Intelligent

Homosexual's Guide, Lou
Liberatore, left, and Jordan Geiger
portray lovers in the West Coast
premiere of Tony Kushner's latest
play. Photo: kevinberne.com

"Empty is the child who is closest to Gus, and her partner is eight months along in a tricky pregnancy,
and she's suddenly faced with how to care for an actively suicidal parent, not to mention her exhusband, who is living with her father in a basement apartment," the playwright explained. "I don't
want to do any spoiling, but Empty is very much implicated in one of the aspects of Gus' intentions to
commit suicide. So it's all very tangled."

First seen at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis in 2009 and at New York's Public Theatre two years
later, the play hadn't yet felt finished to Kushner when he got a call from Tony Taccone, Berkeley
Rep's artistic director, who also happened to have been running the Eureka Theatre when Angels in
America premiered there in 1991. "I was trying to figure out where next to do the play where I could do the work I knew I wanted to do,"
Kushner said. "I've been working on it for five years, and I really feel it is done at least for now."

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.

05/22/2014

http://www.ebar.com/common/inc/article_print.php?sec=theatre&article=1035

Search

NewsSportsBusinessA&EFoodLivingTravelColumnsCarsJobsReal EstateFind&Save

Contact SFGate

Bay Area
49ers
& State
Technology
Entertainment
Restaurants
Home &
Weekend
Garden Getaways
Dealers
Be Your
New
Own
Homes
Boss

About SFGate

TrafficRaidersFinance

After 5 years, writer finally believes his play is finished

Chad Jones
Published 2:59 pm, Wednesday, May 21, 2014

About SF ChronicleNationGiants Markets

Movies
Recipes
Style Neighborhoods Click Job
andEvents
Clack
Open Homes
Entertainment Photos

Music
Wine
& Nightlife
PartiesWine Country

Car Blog
Advertise
Luxury

Advertise with us WorldGiants Fandom

Mortgage Rates
Performance
Top 100
Lust
Restaurants
Monterey-CarmelMy Ride
Salary
Rentals
Wizard
Privacy policy

Politics
A's

Home Guides
Art Top 100
Home
Wines
RX
Tahoe

Site Index

CrimeWarriors
Public Notices
Events
Bargain
SkiBitesHawaii

Newsletters

Tech Sharks SponsoredBooks

Content
Reservations
LGBT Mexico

Neuron
sculpture

Sell Your Car

Mortgage Rates
Commercial
Rock Stars
Bella Italia: A
Place an ad
Behaving Badly
Tribute to
Loren
HomeSophia
Guides

Obituaries
NFL

TV InsideHouzz
ScoopVegas
SF

Opinion
MLB

ClickHealthy
City Sponsored
Eating

Homesales

HealthNBA

Horoscope

Foreclosures

Education
NHL

Comics

Video College

Games

Preps

Most Popular
1

Philip Seymour Hoffman leaves his three

children out of his will

What $1 million buys you in S.F.

Justice Kennedy says Constitution flawed

document

Why does noise continue to grow in

restaurants?

Rock Stars Behaving Badly

What not to wear: swimsuit edition

A bronze Barry Bonds? Kickstarter for

statue on way

Things To Do

Golf
Outdoors
TV

FROM OUR HOMEPAGE

Berkeley Repertory Theatre Artistic Director Tony Taccone (left) and playwright Tony Kushner.
Photo: Kevin Berne

Krukow battles disease

Giants broadcaster has degenerative muscle
ailment called inclusion-body myosotis.

Tweet

Larger | Smaller

Email This

Printable Version

Font

Call it deja vu: Tony Kushner was recently

sitting in Cafe Flore, the popular Castro
restaurant, revising an epic play. It's the spot
where he wrestled with "Angels" - his Tony
Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning play
"Angels in America" - two decades before.

This time he was working on yet another draft

of "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to
Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures," the four-act, nearly four-hour play
that premiered at Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater in 2009 before moving on to New York
and a co-production of the Public Theater and the Signature Theater Company in 2011.

What $1M buys you in S.F.

What a million bucks gets you depends on the
neighborhood. Which one would you choose?

Now the play, an intense drama about smart, boisterous siblings dealing with the
impending suicide of their father, has its West Coast premiere at Berkeley Repertory
Theatre, which Kushner, 57, has described as "the only theater outside of New York where
I truly feel at home."
"When I was sitting in Cafe Flore working on some difficult rewrites, I remembered why

Who's been a bad rocker?

Rock stars often misbehave, and in James
Brown's case, misbehave again and again.

I've always been madly in love with the Bay Area," Kushner says on the phone from New
York. "To go back to that cafe ... it felt somehow magical."
If you think Kushner, also an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter (for Steven
Spielberg's "Munich" and "Lincoln"), can go unrecognized in the Castro, think again.
"A guy sitting next to me had lost a brother to the epidemic and had seen the premiere of
'Angels' at the Eureka in the early '90s," Kushner says. "He wanted to talk to me about
that and was very polite. I told him how moved and grateful I was, he talked to me about
it, then we both went back to our work."
With this rewrite, Kushner feels he has finally finished the play he affectionately calls "iHo."
"Thinking about ancestor figures a lot - Arthur Miller and Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee
Williams," he says. "There was a conscious attempt to see what would happen if I tried to
write a well-made kitchen-sink drama. There was something at the heart of this play, and
this often happens with me, that I didn't feel I was getting to. I was getting close to
something, but not quite sticking it. Two weeks ago, I feel like I got there with this play. I
think I've finally figured it out."
At the helm of "iHo" is Tony Taccone, Berkeley Rep's artistic director and one of the
original co-commissioners of "Angels."
"I love Tony and admire him as an artist," Kushner says. "His team at Berkeley Rep is just
fantastic. Those are among the reasons the Bay Area is always a great place to come back
to."
If you go
The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key
to the Scriptures: 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday. Through June 29. $29
-$59 (subject to change). Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison St.,
Berkeley. (510) 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org.
Chad Jones is a freelance writer. E-mail: 96hours@sfchronicle.com Twitter:
@theaterdogs
Printable Version

Email This

Tweet

Inside SFGate

Monty Python's 'probably'

last show ever

Home

News

Sports

Company Info:
Promotions

Swimwear designer, 19,

debuts in Miami Beach

Business

Contact Us

Entertainment
SFGate staff

Food

Hearst

Thunderdome of Sappy
Parenting Commercials

Living

Travel

Privacy Policy

Philip Seymour Hoffman

leaves his kids nothing

Find&Save Local Shopping

Find Bay Area Jobs

Your California Privacy Rights

Terms & Conditions

Real Estate

Cars

Join our Team

Site Index

Chron in Education

Submissions

Advertising Services: Advertise

Reader Services: Subscribe Now

with us

Place a Classified

Manage Your Subscription

About Our Ads

iPad

E-Edition

Public Notices
Mobile Site

Local Businesses: Business Directory

RSS

2014 Hearst Communications, Inc.

Newsletters

Feedback

FAQ

Ad Choices
Corrections

Get Us

Events &