cover photo by Richard Anderson
“Tony Kushner bears the
curse of all artists unlucky enough to have captured the
zeitgeist. They are expected to continue on their visionary path,
explicating the world's mysteries in each new play. Or they are
tempted to use the stage as a bully pulpit, indicting the cause
of our malaise and dolling out prescriptions to sooth the pain.
It is a mark of Kushner's sophistication that in his newest play
he refuses to rest on his well-earned moral authority. A lesser
writer would have followed ANGELS IN AMERICA with something smug
and sweeping. As though Kushner feared such a fate, he instead
has returned to where he started—a place of healthy confusion.
A taut play results: Kushner's
humor buoys his political anguish, his lyricism draws dry ideas
into rhapsodies and elegies, his interest in character won't let
even the most vaudevillian individual conform to type.”
Marc Robinson, The Village
Voice
“The heaven that Tony Kushner envisions in the epilogue of SLAVS!, his bracing, rational
eighty-minute fantasia is a dark, gloomy place designed to look like
a city after an earthquake....
...he has created a
rambunctiously funny, seriously moving stage piece that is part
buffoonish burlesque and part tragic satire. From beginning to
end, it's also shot through with the kind of irony virtually
unknown in today's theater, movies and television, where sarcasm
passes as wit. There were hints of this exaggerated style in his
epic MILLENIUM APPROACHES and PERESTROIKA, collectively known as
ANGELS IN AMERICA....
Mr Kushner has emphasized that
SLAVS is not to be taken as the work of a historian. Rather, it's
a work of a brilliant and restless imagination.
Mr Kushner's words dazzle, sting and prompt belly laughs.”
Vincent Canby, The New York
Times
originally produced by Actors Theater of Louisville
7 M, 3 F
I S B N: 0-88145-124-X, $8.95
trade edition: Thinking About the Longstanding
Problems of Virtue and Happiness: Essays, a Play, Two
Poems and a Prayer
Theater Communications Group, I S B N: 1-55936-100-X, $13.95