Guthrie Theater

Video: A Conversation with Joe Dowling and Tony Kushner

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AN UNPRECEDENTED THEATRICAL CELEBRATION

April 18 - June 28, 2009
This spring the Guthrie presented a landmark theater-wide celebration honoring the work of playwright Tony Kushner. Best known for his two-part epic Angels in America, Kushner is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for drama, an Emmy Award, two Tony Awards and an Oscar nomination. The celebration featured three productions on three unique stages, including the Tony-nominated musical Caroline, or Change, the world premiere of The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures (commissioned by the Guthrie), and an extraordinary line up of five rarely seen works in Tiny Kushner: An Evening of Short Plays. In addition, the Theater offered a series of speakers, scholars and special events designed to fully examine and celebrate Kushner's body of work.

KUSHNER CELEBRATION DECLARED A SUCCESS!

(Minneapolis/St. Paul) From April 18 through June 28, Tony Kushner reigned in Minneapolis and today the Guthrie Theater released information on the stunning success of the Kushner Celebration. In the mainstream media, blogs and social networking sites like Twitter; in coffee shops, restaurants and gatherings throughout the Twin Cities; and in the Guthrie's lobbies, bars and box office lines, everyone was talking Kushner!

• Ticket buyers from all 50 states, as well as Canada, Europe and Japan, traveled to the Guthrie to participate in this unprecedented theatrical event!
• More than 90,000 people from around the world attended the plays, classes, seminars, workshops and other events of the Kushner Celebration!
• All three productions of the Kushner Celebration - Caroline, or Change; Tiny Kushner and The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures exceeded their box office goals!

Here's what the media was saying...

...about the Kushner Celebration:

"...one of the most ambitious (and quite possibly subversive) theater events ever to happen in this country."

Mpls.St.Paul Magazine (Tad Simons)

 "... a coup for the Guthrie."

Associated Press (Patrick Condon)

 "... a supersized endeavor in a nonprofit legit landscape disposed to downsizing... the latest step by the Guthrie to take a more prominent role on the national stage."

Variety (Gordon Cox)

"As part of the festival, Mr. Kushner received an honorary doctorate on May 21 at the University of Minnesota, and there are rosters of speakers, symposiums and classes on the Kushner cosmos. The festival also took over the nine-story, midnight-blue new Guthrie Theater, perched above the Mississippi River. The three year-old $125 million complex by the French architect Jean Nouvel is a mash-up of the silolike grain mill form - old mills are visible in several directions - and the emphatic power of transport: a dramatic boxcar shape juts from the building like a bolt from Zeus, aiming toward the river. Inside, Mr. Kushner reigns: from the gift shop on the ground floor, with its mugs, T-shirts ("The Intelligent Homosexual," one says), books and posters; to the revival of "Caroline, or Change," staged by the Guthrie's director of movement, Marcela Lorca, in the Wurtele Thrust Stage; to "Tiny Kushner," an evening of one-acts in the small Dowling Studio at the top of the building, directed by Tony Taccone, the artistic director of the Berkeley Rep in California."

The New York Times (Andrea Stevens)