Great, yet ANOTHER rerun of "The Unquiet Death of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg." http://www.frif.com/cat97/t-z/the_unqu.html

My favorite comment from the WSJ Opinion piece you link is this:

"The forum was generally arcane and self-serious. Messrs. Doctorow and Kushner ventilated many concerns about the relation of culture to society, chief among them the obligation of the artist to accurately represent the past. The pair eventually settled on the definition of historical art as "an aesthetic system of opinions," as the good Doctorow put it."

Since these "artists" (er, leftist hacks) are incapable of "accurately representing the past," (ah, the truth) they must settle for "an aesthetic system of opinions," (duh, lies).

Any chance Mr. Kushner's next play will be "Springtime for Stalin"?

How do you do this?

I have a friend who thinks I’m a hopeless philistine because I nodded off an hour or so into the off-Broadway production of Angels in America: The Milennium Approaches. Looking back, I think it was more of a critical comment. Tony Kushner is this generation’s Clifford Odets—a mediocre playwright who covers up his lack of skill by grandstanding on hot-button issues. In thirty years Angels in America is going to rank right up there with Waiting for Lefty in the history of American theatre.

The Book of Daniel, OTOH, was a pretty good novel. Too bad Doctorow can’t admit that its central premise—the Rosenbergs as martyrs—is just a big load of hooey.

Kushner & Odets is a great comparison. Angels in America is a farrago of political nonsense, but it said what the elite wanted to hear, & did so at a time when there was no alternative media to challenge it. People were afraid to criticize it for fear of being called homophobic. I read a critical piece that noted not one character in that play experiences emotional growth, except for 'the liberating power of liberal bromides.'

And please, there's something to be said in artistic terms for brevity. If it takes you 7 hrs to make your point, that should tell you about the artistic merits of the piece. Kushner ain't Shakespeare. Doctorow is a good writer, but another deluded nut. I made the mistake of hearing him in SF once, & instead of talking about his craft, he droned on & on, reading from a leaden rant against the Gulf War, about which he knew nothing

When I was a young man, my progressive public school rounded us youngins up for a week of Kamp Kinder lite in the wilds of Rhode Island.

Hippie environmental sing alongs and collective punishment (some of my cabin dwellers were accused of malicious hooliganism so all of us were made to atone) were the main features of the experience.
Along with mass doses of Rosenberg propaganda.

The root cause of why I hate Rosenberg apologists, and hippies to this day.

Kushner's pretentious, overheated endurance-athons push all the right buttons with his lefty target audience--they are calculated to manipulate white guilt in ways that the willingly duped find both "instructive" and "unplifting." Kushner enjoys berating his viewers for their capitalistic greed and selfishness before all but fellating them with his smarmy assurances that as repentent liberals, they are good people, after all. Why it takes him so many boring, ponderous hours to convey his frankly prosaic "ideas" and, more pressingly, why critics and audiences not only permit but *praise* his self-indulgence is a mystery to me. I think it's worth noting that he looks to the Stalinist propagandist Bertolt Brecht as his artistic mentor. Like Brecht, Kushner prefers politics to people, ideas to emotions, and rhetoric to conversation. I find nothing remotely human or alive in any of his plays, however hard his often brilliant actors (Marcia Gay Harden, Linda Emond, Tonya Pinkens) push at their moribund roles. His theatrical world is insular and airless and appeals, I think, less to lovers of art than to those who enjoy having a famous writer validate their own superiority and smugness.

Right, he's like a living artifact. There's also no difference between his Nation agitprop & his drama

I seem to recall that one of the few unfavorable reviews of Angels in America came from then-editor of TNR, Andrew Sullivan and it was featured on the cover of TNR. As I remember, Sullivan said everything I was thinking at the time. Too bad he's since gone crazy.

True. Also Camille Paglia:

"...it does not help the gay movement for Christian ideas to be routinely defamed by so many childish, nihilist gay writers. Playwright Tony Kushner, for example, whom I called a writer of "self-canonizing propaganda," falls pathetically short of the artistic stature of Tennessee Williams, any gay man who wrote masterpieces that are admired around the world.

"Self-canonizing propaganda." Exactly.

And we can't forget the Cuban connections, Jeff :p

Done!

The toaster was a nice touch.

What a welcome post. The Cuban memorial is disgusting.

Amazing, I think, how that memorial has the same aesthetically unpleasing flare as the art de Soviet we all fondly remember. Gracias, Señor Infidel Castrato.

A comparison betweeen the Rosenbergs and I Love Lucy characters would have been completely inconceivable without the blogosphere.

It just struck me.

As usual, Jeff, brilliant stuff!

Favorite Intoxicant:

Rosenberg: international proletarian revolution

Mertz: Vita-Meata-Vegamin

"I would like my plays to be of use to progressive people. I think preaching to the converted is exactly what art ought to do."
- T. Kushner (in a 1995 Mother Jones interview)

Beware all who go see "Munich"....

Please tell me you made up that quote

just googe tony kushner mother jones, it should be one of the first hits.

That's funny because I saw another interview where he assured us he had no political agenda when writing Munich (he previously said the creation of Israel was a catastrophe). I guess like Arafat he says one thing to one crowd, then spills the beans to Mother Jones

Since this is my Vaudevillian venue for telling odd fun facts about myself, I feel that it's important to tell everyone that in seventh grade, I watched every single episode of I Love Lucy for a video History Day project, and this post is giving me seriously hideous awkward junior high flashbacks.

As it was a clip in my video that I watched and edited six bajallion times, I did the entire Vitameatavegamin shtick from memory when I needed a monologue for theatrical auditions*.

*=Ill-fated, that career path was, as you can plainly see

Do you ever, you know, work it into your job?

"I guess like Arafat he says one thing to one crowd, then spills the beans to Mother Jones."

Jeff, Jeff, when will you ever learn? When you are a brave, beautiful progressive keffiyeh-sporting messenger of truth and social justice and speaking truth to power, especially Amerikkan imperialist running dog power, or a Jew who hates Israel, sometimes you're entitled to, you know, fudge the truth a bit. As long as it's for a good cause. Just around the edges a little. As long as you promise not to do it unless you really, really need to.