Use your Illusion

Plenty of artists would like to forget their earliest works. For his, Tony Kushner was smart enough to riff off an established (if now little-known) classic: L’Illusion Comique, a groundbreaking 17th-century work by daring young playwright Pierre Corneille. Still, his adaptation didn’t come without a hiccup or two—like possibly disturbing Corneille’s ghost.

As Columbia University and NYU grad Kushner recalls, he was beginning to write his seminal Angels in America, and funds were running low: “I needed money to pay the rent,” he says in a phone interview. The New York Theatre Workshop asked him to do a new translation of the 1636 comedy, whose play-within-a-play trope was a prominent early example of metatheatricality, for a 1988 reading. He set aside what would become his opus to reinterpret Corneille’s play, initially earning $700 for his efforts.

Its 1989 premiere at Hartford Stage won praise from The New York Times; other theaters picked it up, and the dramatist suddenly had a modest hit. “I made my first money as a playwright from all these productions of The Illusion,” says the 53-year-old Pulitzer winner.

Two decades later, it’s still getting the occasional remount—witness Court Theatre’s revival, currently in previews. Kushner’s artistic relationship with Court began in 2008, when artistic director Charles Newell helmed a highly acclaimed production of Caroline, or Change, which set box-office records for the theater. Newell is also directing The Illusion; he’s been consulting via phone and e-mail with Kushner, who’ll spend a week in Hyde Park in early April (the pair will give an Artspeaks talk at the University of Chicago April 6).

While not as ambitious in scope as Angels, The Illusion, Newell notes, is not without its challenges. Because the plot concerns a father who consults with a magician to find his estranged son, Newell and his design team had to brainstorm a way to depict three illusions to the father (and the audience).

To that end, Newell says, they’ve hired a magician consultant, the House Theatre’s Dennis Watkins—who knows a thing or two about stage magic, having been bound and submerged into a water tank as Harry Houdini. With Watkins’s help, Newell reports, Court’s Illusion “contains moments of genuine magic, where actors, right in front of your eyes, seemingly disappear.”

Of course, not all productions go quite so smoothly. Kushner recalls some serious issues as the play’s first opening night approached, 21 years ago. Well into previews, actors would forget their lines while odd technical glitches kept occurring. Meanwhile, because Kushner’s script was, to say the least, a very liberal translation of the French Baroque original (he even added the third illusion to amp up Corneille’s original two), he says “there was a great argument” about proper author attribution. Originally the program and marquee read, “The Illusion by Tony Kushner, freely adapted from the play by Pierre Corneille.”

“I was talking to my father on the telephone,” Kushner continues, “and he said, ‘Maybe Pierre Corneille’s mad at you about putting your name above his.’ So we switched it, and that night, everything came together.”

Even the program was reprinted, and on the day of the official opening, Kushner got to the theater to discover that half of the plastic letters spelling out his name had fallen off the marquee, “which I thought was one final warning from Corneille never to try that again,” he says. Court, naturally, will be giving him second billing.

The Illusion opens Saturday 20.

• More Theater articles