IN ACT III, Scene 2 of “Millennium Approaches,” Louis asks, “Why has democracy succeeded in America?” It’s not precisely a rhetorical query, and Louis’s rambling try to reply it isn’t totally persuasive, actually to not his pal Belize, a Black, homosexual nurse who cares for males dying from AIDS-related sicknesses, and who possesses an acute sense of the failures and compromises of the American experiment. (Louis’s monologue solely ends when Belize, after attempting to take part within the debate, lastly responds, “POWER to the folks! AMEN! … OH MY GOODNESS! Will you take a look at the time, I gotta. …”)
After we meet in Central Park for a second dialog (with no shock appearances from main filmmakers), I inform Kushner that I feel the argument between Louis and Belize — a protection of excellent intentions and progressive tendencies countered by an insistence on the exhausting structural details of exclusion, oppression and hatred — remains to be ongoing, maybe with extra depth and more durable emotions than earlier than.
We speak about that for some time, and likewise about how the censoriousness of the left isn’t symmetrical with the authoritarianism of the proper, about what Kushner calls the “radical impatience of the younger,” about Twitter and TikTok and the early Twentieth-century German playwright Bertolt Brecht, a hero of Kushner’s, who as soon as stated, “Don’t begin from the nice outdated issues however the dangerous new ones.” We agree greater than we disagree, however the dialog nonetheless has a bracing, combative power.
Kushner’s stage and screenwriting consists of an awesome many household quarrels — passionate debates amongst people who find themselves essentially on the identical aspect. Louis and Belize share not solely their love of Prior, Louis’s former lover, who they’re afraid will die of issues from AIDS, however a cautious, queer New York kinship. In “Lincoln,” a lot of the dramatic battle takes place throughout the cupboard, the Congress and the Republican Celebration, folks dedicated a minimum of in precept to the protection of union and the abolition of slavery. In “Caroline, or Change,” the Southern white supremacist place is represented by that silent statue; the Gellmans are outsiders, a few of whom think about themselves to be on the angelic aspect of historical past. Kushner’s capacity to name forth these household quarrels inside liberalism — their endlessness, their ardour — might in the end be what marks him as an awesome New York voice. That’s the music of town, in any case. It’s additionally the music of democracy, the soundtrack to the perpetually embattled American experiment.
Which is in a scary place proper now. Finally, Kushner jokes that Louis’s rhetorical query might need to be amended or scrapped altogether. Democracy will not be succeeding in America, and the grand argument that connects President Lincoln to Caroline Thibodeaux could also be heading towards a murderous Jets and Sharks rumble.
Neutrality, for Kushner, is rarely an choice. “I all the time get aggravated when folks speak about theater that preaches to the transformed,” he says. “That’s so silly. Who do you look forward to finding in your synagogue? … After I train playwriting, I all the time inform my college students — and it’s nearly unattainable to do that explicit factor with out having some type of phantom viewers in your head — that it is best to work actually exhausting to populate that viewers with individuals who essentially agree with you about sure issues. As a result of in case you don’t, then you definately begin from a place of needing to teach them about that which you already know, which I feel ensures didacticism and a sure dullness. The place that you simply wish to begin is these nice arguments that you’ve with your mates.”
What you wish to do, in different phrases, is dare to take part within the nice historic mistake of your time.