The Illusion

From Booklist
Best known for the ambitious, intellectually engaging though somewhat bloated Angels in America, Tony Kushner is capable of writing in lighter keys. Witness this witty adaptation of Corneille's seventeenth-century comedy, L'illusion Comique. Not content to merely translate the play, Kushner rehabs it, paring it down to two acts while adding several scenes of his own. The resulting Corneille-Kushner hybrid is a wonderful, postmodern work, at once a homage to and a send-up of the conventions and devices of neoclassical comedy: the long speeches, the play within a play, the formulaic plot. On one level, the play works as a two-act meditation on the power of theater and the importance of illusion and storytelling; on another, it is the genuinely moving story of an old man's search for his long-lost son. "The art of illusion," one of Kushner's characters quips, "is the art of love, and the art of love is the blood-red heart of the world." It is this heart that saves Kushner's Illusion from being merely an academic exercise. Jack Helbig


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Freely adapted by playwright Tony Kushner, "The Illusion" triumphs as a thoroughly modern rendering of Pierre Corneille's neoclassical French comedy, "L'Illusion Comique." Tthis adaptation offers readers the exquisite wordplay, beguiling comedy and fierce intelligence found in all of Kushner's work. "The Illusion" follows a contrite father, Pridamant, seeking news of his prodigal son from the sorcerer Alcandre. The magician conjures three episodes from the young man's life. Inexplicably, each scene finds the boy in a slightly different world: names change, allegiances shift and fairy-tale simplicity evolves into elegant tragedy. Pridamant watches, enthralled by the boy's struggles, but only as the strange tale reaches its conclusion does the father confront the ultimate—and unexpected—truth about his son. An enchanting argument for the power of theatrical imagination over reality, "The Illusion" weaves obsession and caprice, romance and murder, fact and fiction, into an enticing exploration of the greatest illusion of all—love.


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