Tony Kushner play is another masterpiece
The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide .... . .
(out of 4) By Tony Kushner. Directed by Eda Holmes. Until Oct. 10 at the Studio Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake. shawfest.com or 905-468-2172 Truly great moments in the theatre don’t come too often. In more than three decades of Shaw Festival theatre-going, I doubt if I have yet hit double figures.
But to that list add a play with an impossible title: The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, by Tony Kushner.
Kushner is best known for the dazzling, two-part Angels in America, but The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide, now at the Shaw Festival’s Studio Theatre, is another work with masterpiece stamped all over it.
The title is a mash-up of a Bernard Shaw political treatise and a work by Christian Scientist Mary Baker Eddy and may sound off-putting. The play itself, however, is wonderful.
It revolves around a former longshoreman and union organizer, the fiercely intelligent autodidact Gus Marcantonio.
Gus, who believes he may have Alzheimer’s, has called his family together to announce his upcoming suicide. It will be his second attempt; a year ago, he slashed his wrists in the bathtub.
But first he has decided to sell the Brooklyn brownhouse where his family has lived for more than a century, leaving his daughter and two sons with a tidy sum of money.
Once a fervent Communist Party activist, Gus sees that all his efforts have come to naught; the world is still the prison whose walls he was trying to tear down all his life. Mired in a black pit of despair he is stub- bornly, bravely unwilling to compromise.
As Gus, Jim Mezon is simply remarkable, passion and pain chasing across his face and echoed in his body language. A loving father who knows his death will shatter several lives, Mezon convinces us that, for him, a life without meaning and purpose is the real death. Even his one great triumph is tainted.
And there are problems — and se- crets — aplenty elsewhere. Daughter Empty (derived from Maria Teresa, or MT) and her partner are about to have a child, with an assist from one of Empty’s brothers. But the love and romance aren’t there anymore.
Kelli Fox gives an intensely focused, at times heart-wrenching performance as the labour lawyer who learned communism at her father’s knee but whose emotional problems threaten to overwhelm her.
The two brothers are Pill (Steven Sutcliffe), who has been in a relationship for 26 years but who has fallen hard for a hooker named Eli; and slighted youngest son Vito (Gray Powell), a building contractor who missed out on his father’s tutelage.
Add to the mix Gus’s sister Clio (Fiona Reid), a former nun and Maoist, and Empty’s ex-husband Adam (Thom Marriott) and you have one of the most extraordinary, flamboyant families seen onstage for many a long year. And the acting is wonderful, across the board.
People argue, shout and talk across each other. Ideas and language spin around the stage like throwing knives. It is a deeply intoxicating mix that acknowledges debts to playwrights such as Shaw, Arthur Miller and Chekhov.
It is a tribute to the clear-sighted direction of Eda Holmes that the entire four hours are a fast-moving, mostly coherent whole. Black comedy marches side by side with looming tragedy; large ideas such as the destructive power of capitalism and monetarism rub shoulders with family squabbles and tangled relationships.
This is terrific theatre. Please don’t miss it.