Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
✭✭✭✭✭
by Tony Kushner, directed by Eda Holmes
Shaw Festival, Studio Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
July 26-October 10, 2015
“You meant to cure me but in fact, my friends, you’ve killed me.
That dream of mine alone kept me alive”
– from Gus’s translation of Horace, Book II, Second Epistle.
Tony Kushner’s play from 2009, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, is the most dramatically and intellectually complex play we are likely to see in Ontario this year. Eda Holmes, who gave us such a fine production of Arcadia, Tom Stoppard’s play of intellectual fireworks, in 2013, succeeds again in bringing out the very best from her starry cast. Anyone who wonders what Kushner has to say after the two parts of Angels in America (1991 and 1992) and after eight years of George W. Bush as president, will find iHo (as Kushner has nicknamed it) a feast for thought. Though the play is nearly four hours long, the time rushes past almost too swiftly because we are so engaged with the characters Kushner creates and plot he has devised.
The title references two very different works – one political, one religious. The first is a treatise written by George Bernard Shaw in 1928 called The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. Shaw wrote it at his sister-in-law’s request to help keep her female friends au fait with the political movements of the day, but, as David Kornhaber’s excellent programme note to iHo points out, Shaw used the occasion to vent his own despair at the failure of socialism.
The second half of Kushner’s title refers to the central text of Christian Science, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, first published in 1875 by American Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910). While Mormonism, another American-born version of Christianity, plays a major role in Angels in America, Christian Science does not in iHo. Instead, it represents a world view that is the opposite of one devoted to political action. In Christian Science, a faith heavily influenced by neo-Platonism and Eastern religion, the material world, including sin, disease and death, are viewed as illusions. The title, like the play, treats the clash of world views – one that sees the world as material, one as immaterial.
The action begins in June 2007 and is set primarily in a brownstone in the Carroll Gardens area of Brooklyn. The owner of the property and former longshoreman and family patriarch Augusto Giuseppe Garibaldi Marcantonio (Jim Mezon), known as Gus, has told his sister Clio Annunziata (Fiona Reid), known as Clio, that he intends to commit suicide. Clio takes this threat seriously, since Gus had tried to commit suicide almost exactly a year earlier. She, therefore, calls Gus’s three children to come home to dissuade their father from his intention.
The eldest of the three is Pier Luigi (Steven Sutcliffe), known as Pill. The middle child is Maria Teresa (Kelli Fox), known as Empty (i.e., M.T). The youngest is Vito (Grey Powell), known simply as V. The private lives of the three form the subplots to the main plot that centres on Gus.
Over the course of the action Gus gives many different reasons for his desire to commit suicide. The first is that he has Alzheimer’s. This is rather hard to believe since his memory is so extensive and he is presently engaged in translating Horace’s Epistles (20bc and 14bc) from Latin into English. His second reason, which goes down well with no one, is his desire to sell the brownstone and thus provide each child with a legacy of almost $500,000 each. After much probing and arguing, Gus eventually gives a far more essential reason. As a lifelong member of the American Communist Party he has seen everything he has striven for destroyed. He finds he lives in a world where his ideals are not just ignored but despised and any hope for a revolution has vanished.
Connected with this is the other side of what he has viewed as his greatest victory. In the mid-1970s, when the containerization of the Brooklyn waterfront threatened to cause the loss of longshoremen’s jobs, the ILWU, of which Gus was a leader, successfully went on strike for a Guaranteed Annual Income for its members. Only late in the play does Gus reveal what really happened – senior members would be paid for not working for the rest of their lives, but junior members, including one of his best friends, lost their jobs. Thus, for Gus, who believes so strongly in the strength of union, his biggest success was also his biggest failure and he has been haunted by this ever since.
If Gus is plagued by the failure of unions in a political sense, his children are plagued by the failure of unions in a personal sense. His gay son Pill has been “married” for 26 years to his partner Paul (André Sills), a theology professor. Yet, Pill is also undergoing therapy for his addiction to sex with male prostitutes. His main conflict is that he has fallen in love with one of these prostitutes, a hustler named Eli (Ben Sanders), on whom he has spent $30,000 of his sister’s money. The question for most of the play is whether Pill will be able choose one or the other and if he can gather enough will-power to choose, who will it be?
Pill’s sister Empty, a labour lawyer, also has problems with her union. She was married to a real estate lawyer Adam (Thom Marriott) for six years and Adam still lives in the basement apartment of the family brownstone. But when studying for her law degree, Empty started a relationship with a theology student Maeve (Diana Donnelly), who wanted to secure their union by having a baby. Since Empty had already lent Pill the money she and Maeve would have used for artificial insemination, Maeve has used sperm from Vito to become pregnant. Not only is Empty not interested in having a family, she still has sex with Adam when she feels like it.
Vito’s life is probably the least complicated. Unlike Pill and Empty, he rejected Gus’s anti-establishment, anticapitalist principles and became a policeman before running his own contracting agency. His relationship with Gus has never been good since complications from his birth brought about the death of his mother, Gus’s wife. Gus has never recovered from this blow and his first attempt at suicide was on the Vito birthday which to Gus is still the day of his wife’s death. In terms of his marital union, Vito is no more a saint than Pill or Empty, though at least his transgression was confined to only one episode.
Rounding out the family and summing up the themes of politics, religion and union, is Gus’s sister Clio, whose name is the same as that of the Greek muse of history. Clio has previously found homes as a member of a sect. Immediately after high school, she became a Discalced Carmelite nun. Thirty years later, she left her convent in Peru to join the Maoist guerrilla insurgent group Shining Path for four years. Asked by Gus to move in with him, Clio is now reading Science and Health. While Clio is attracted to the book’s dismissal of death as unreal, Empty finds the concept and its implications disturbing. Of all the characters, Clio has travelled the deepest into religion by becoming a nun and also travelled the farthest left by becoming a Maoist. Her desire to live despite the failure of both her religious and political ideals stands in stark contrast to Gus’s view of his own life and how to remain true to himself.
What is significantly different is that the desire for suicide of Miller’s Willy Loman is secret and shameful whereas for Kushner’s Gus Marcantonio it is open and defiant. Willy believes in the capitalist American Dream, whereas Gus believes in its overthrow. The fact that Willy and Gus, coming from such opposite points of view, should both come to despair and wish to die is an even greater indictment of America as a place where people’s dreams can come true. Kushner suggests they come true for neither those on the right nor on the left because of pre-existing vested politico-economic interests that inhibit change.
Kushner depicts the increasing chaos enveloping the Marcantonio family by having characters talk over other characters. While this happens naturally in real life in any large social gathering, it’s a highly unusual technique on the stage, Caryl Churchill making pioneering use of it in Top Girls (1982) currently playing at the Festival. Competing conversations pop up now and then in the early parts of iHo, but they blossom into an enormous cacophony in Act 3 where all nine characters on stage are arguing with each other at the same time. You can either let all this talk wash over you like some kind of verbal music, or you can drop in selectively into the various arguments, all coherent in themselves, as they proceed. This effect is extremely difficult to achieve, but Eda Holmes and her cast pull it off with amazing precision and gusto.
Holmes’s has clearly risen to the challenge of Kushner’s material with inspired vigour. You may have thought you have already seen the best-ever performances from such actors as Jim Mezon, Steven Sutcliffe, Kelli Fox and Grey Powell, but this production will prove you wrong. It is here in this play that these four masters of serious prose drama all outdo themselves. It is absolutely astonishing how completely these four embody their roles and how furiously, as if from personal conviction, they argue their positions.
Jim Mezon is simply magnificent as Gus Marcantonio. His performance has such breadth, depth and intensity you feel that his character is the equal to past great patriarchs in American drama like James Tyrone or Willy Loman. Sutcliffe’s Pill is infuriating because the character is so well played. Pill is a man seemingly intent on self-destruction and, in that, is strangely like his father. Kelli Fox has played her share of vigorous, intelligent women, but here fully encompasses all Empty’s contradictions – her ferocity, intellect, generosity and despair. Grey Powell plays Vito like a tightly wound spring ready to be sprung at any moment. His Vito seethes with years of resentment towards his father and his siblings so that he can hardly bear being near them.
Holmes may have drawn fine performances from these four central figures, but all seven of the others are also working at the highest level. André Sills has never been so articulate and intense as he is here as Paul. Diana Donnelly has never been so funny as the self-obsessed Ivory Tower intellectual Maeve. Ben Sanders finds frightening depths in the intellectual-turned-nihilist Eli. And Fiona Reid’s portrayal of Clio is as funny as it is chilling. Reid shows us a woman who, having had allegiances to the extreme left and right, now has allegiance to no one but herself.
Thom Marriott’s hopelessly in love Adam, Jasmin Chen’s defensive Sooze (Vito’s wife) and Julie Martell’s Michelle are all memorable. Martell, in fact, may achieve the single most emotional moment in the play when in trying to describe coolly and objectively how her husband committed suicide, her character fights to repress her not so deeply buried sadness.
Peter Hartwell’s non-naturalistic set brilliantly references the internal conflict inside Gus. The at first glance looks like a shabby two-storey home. At second glance, we see that it is make up on containers with serial numbers. Hartwell thus shows that Gus is still living in the moment of of greatest victory and greatest defeat. The coldness of the metal staircases on the far left and right of the main acting space also echo the allusions that all the family make to their home as a kind of prison.
iHo does not have the spectacle of supernatural beings and dream spirits that inhabit Angels in America and while it depicts numerous highly emotional scenes it encourages us not to identify with the characters but to view them objectively. Kushner wants us to look at the relation between individuals’ abstract ideals and way they conduct their lives, and to ask whether flaws in personal behaviour undermine or actually contribute to the moral and political stances that people espouse. Union or unity among people always remains an ideal, but, Kushner asks, by what means and at what cost should it be achieved. After experiencing iHo at the Shaw Festival, you will be convinced you’ve seen a production that could not be bettered anywhere in the world.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Jim Mezon and Fiona Reid; Grey Powell, Kelli Fox, Steven Sutcliffe, Jim Mezon and Fiona Reid; Steven Sutcliffe and Ben Sanders. ©2015 David Cooper.
2015-08-03
The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures