The Theater of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope by James Fisher (review)

Reviews 173 have faulted his plays for being chaotic, disconcerting, and undisciplined, but Plunka concludes that Guare is "perhaps one of the most successful innovators of the contemporary American stage" (234). The Black Comedy ofJohn Guare will be of value to students and scholars of contemporary American drama. While (he narrative is somewhat turgid. Plunka's research efforts are extensive and impressive. He sets out to describe and analyze Guare's contributions to the American theatre. His judgment is sound and his conclusions noteworthy. JAMES FISHER. The Theater of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope. Studies in Modem Drama Series. New York: Routledge, 2001. Pp. xii + 274, illustrated. $85.00 (Hb); $19.95 (Pb). Reviewed by Mary L. Cutler, University ofNorth Dakota The Theater ofTony Kushner: Living Past Hope is an insightful and thorough examination of the Kushner canon. In it James Fisher illuminates the renowned playwright's works and influential aspects of his life and career, smartly capilalizing upon readers' familiarity with Kushner's hit play Angels in America by using it as a basis for comparison with his other works, including his children's texts. opera libretti, screenplays, one-aclS, adaptations, works-inprogress , and other full-length plays. In his introduction Fisher astutely analyzes how Kushner's admitted role models (Shakespeare, Brecht, Williams, and Kramer) have influenced his playwriting; but Fisher's perceptions concerning the ways in which Kushner's writing resembles that of Ibsen, Shaw, Wilder, Odets, O'Neill, Albee, Durang, Mamet, Shepard, and Ghelderode are masterful. Fisher finds that Kushner's unique, significant, and recurring themes concern mainly the nature of love as understood through the prisms of diverse cultures from seventeenth -century France to the shretls of Eastern Europe, the rise of capitalism at the dawn of the industrialage, issues of spirituality and religion, lhe moral dilemmas of the Holocaust, the collapse of the Soviet Union, environmental catastrophe, psychoanalysis , grassroots lax revolt, the experience of immigrants coming to the United States, the struggles of gays within a homophobic society, the nature of art, and the meanings of death and the afterlife. (13) Also in the introductory chapter Fisher illuminates Kushner's formative life experiences: his musical parents, liberal Jewish background, and Louisiana childhood and adolescence; his studies in English literature at Columbia University and directing at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts; 174 REV1EWS his early directing and playwriting for regional and New York theatres; and the numerous grants, awards, and fellowships he received. Fisher remarks that even in his early children's play Yes Yes No No (1 986), Kushner "explores themes no less significant than the creation of the universe and the meaning of good and evil" (16). Chapter one is Fisher's discussion of A Bright Room Called Day (1985), which "explores the links among all kinds of evil, whether of the overtly horrific brand offered by Hitler or the less obvious varieties Kushner identifies within late-twentieth-century political conservatism as represented by Reagan, Bush, and Thatcher" (25). To develop this theme in what Fisher calls a "dramatic treatise on individuals caught up in the larger sweep of historical, political, and social change" (24), Kushner links a crowd of nineteen-thirties Berliners to anineteen-eighties Jewishfeminist activist. In this and in all of his chapters Fisher presents comprehensive production histories of the plays examined and summarizes wide-ranging varieties of criticism. Chapter two is a discussion of Hydriotaphia, or The Death ofDr. Browne (1987), Kushner's fiction concerning the dying day of the seventeenth-century author, physician, and "seminal capitalist" (39). In this play Kushner deals with "not only the encroachment of capitalism, but also the marriage of superstition to religion and their collision with science" (5 I). Of the play's style, Fisher quips, "Here, Restoration comedy meets a Saturday matinee horror movie, Browne meets the Marxes (Karl and Groucho), and the result is a surprisingly bracing, nightmarish romp through church, cemetery, and capitalism" (51). Chapter three is devoted to Kushner's two-part blockbuster, Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika (1990), which, according to Fisher, presents a battle of political ideologies in order to explore the deeper anxieties of its characters through theirvisions of the ways...