Off-Broadway Premiere Set for Tony Kushner's Intelligent Homosexual's Guide

Tony Kushner’s new play The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures is headed to New York in March 2011. Michael Greif, who directed the world premiere of the play at the Guthrie Theatre in April 2009, will helm the off-Broadway mounting, a co-production of the Public Theater and Signature Theatre Company. The play will run at the Public from March 22 to June 12, 2011. Casting will be announced at a later date.

The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures explores revolution, radicalism, marriage, sex, prostitution, politics, real estate, unions of all kinds and debts both repaid and unpayable. Set in the summer of 2007, the play centers on Gus Marcantonio, a retired longshoreman who summons his children to the family’s Brooklyn brownstone for a series of shocking announcements.

Greif's Guthrie production of The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide, presented in three acts with a running time of three hours and 40 minutes, had a cast that included Michael Cristofer as Marcantonio, Angels in America alums Kathleen Chalfant and Stephen Spinella, plus Linda Emond and Michael Esper.

Both the Public Theater and Signature Theatre Company have ties to Kushner. The Public's Artistic Director Oskar Eustis directed the playwright's first professional production, A Bright Room Called Day, at the Eureka Theatre in San Francisco, and Greif later directed the play at the Public, which developed Kushner’s musical Caroline, or Change and transferred it to Broadway in 2004. In 2006, Kushner’s translation of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children was presented at Shakespeare in the Park. Signature will devote its 20th anniversary season to Kushner, including the first New York revival of Angels in America.

In a statement, Kushner said, “Oskar [Eustis] and I have been working together closely since the start of my career. The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide, or as I’ve been abbreviating it, iHo, has deep roots in an ongoing conversation with Oskar about life, politics and art that’s essential to my thinking and writing. Since I began working on it, this play has felt to me like it belonged at the Public.” Of the Signature, he added, “Since I began working on this play, I felt it would make a perfect choice for the new play slot in my Signature season.”