At the other extreme theatrically from a head trip like Sleep No More is the head-y but emphatically not trippy latest from Tony Kushner, the endlessly (and, really, entitled) Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures, playing the last few weeks at the Public Theater. The title’s double allusion to Shaw and Mary Baker Eddy does an excellent job of warning us what we are in for: four hours of people who are alienated from the bases of their affections and, indeed, from their own bodies and who, despite a total inability to communicate, refuse Tom Lehrer’s famous advice to at least have the decency to shut up.

I haven’t got a perfect fix on what it is that animates my antipathy for Tony Kushner’s work. I recognize his talent. He’s got considerable wit. I thought the first half of Angels in America was brilliant (I saw the original run, not the recent revival). But as early as the second half of that early play I began to have trouble with him.

Perhaps it’s that he writes dramas of ideas, but frequently about ideas I don’t find compelling. (Kushner presumes not only upon an interest in left-wing politics, but on a particular framework for that interest, which really is presuming twice too much.) Perhaps it’s because he simply will not edit down to reasonable theatrical length. The second half of Angels was hopelessly bloated; I got the strong feeling that it was as long as it was simply because he couldn’t cut any of the wonderful bits in the first three-hour installment, and he couldn’t very have the second half be only an hour and a half long. And this new play isn’t just long: it’s repetitive. (And it has as many consecutive endings as “The Return of the King.”)

Perhaps it’s that his plays too often feel like situations rather than stories, their stasis unsuccessfully masked by endless chatter. In this play, basically every character ends up right back where he or she started – the suicidal father is still determined to kill himself, the alienated youngest son is confirmed in his alienation, the weak oldest son is confirmed in his weakness – and so on. It’s not Chekhov – we don’t see hopelessness play itself out to its fully pathetic end. It’s not even O’Neill, characters finally revealing to each other how shattered they are. I had no sense of tragic catharsis when the patriarch, Gus Marcantonio, finally gets rid of his family and is able to kill himself. I just thought: yeah, of course he got what he wanted. He was a stubborn old bastard who always got his way at the beginning, and he’s still a stubborn old bastard who always gets his way.

Or perhaps it’s his fondness for a certain self-loathing male character who I assume is a kind of negative author stand-in – the character was names Louis in Angels and he’s named Pill in iHomo, but whatever his name is, he’s always the same: someone who cannot really give or receive love, and who is also a failure in his professional life, and who we are supposed to believe is redeemed, in some fashion through a kind of political epiphany (in Louis’s case, the epiphany is that his Mormon Republican boyfriend, though professing a kind of libertarianism, isn’t actually going to challenge the anti-gay assumptions in conservative jurisprudence; in Pill’s case, it’s his thesis about gay Trotskyites opening up the possibility of a leftism that is ecstatic rather than puritanical … or something). I have no objection to art that makes me spend time with loathsome and self-loathing characters. I was riveted by “Carnal Knowledge.” Heck, I had kind things to say about “Greenberg.” It’s something about the way Kushner clearly loves this character, though, that makes me hate him so much. He hasn’t earned that love. Not from me. And I’m not going to indulge him until he does – not by “saving the cat” or some other trick to win sympathy, but by making me feel with him.

And that’s the biggest problem I have with Kushner’s work. I am oppressed by a lack of direct access to his characters’ feelings. Oh, they feel, don’t get me wrong. Heck, even Shaw’s characters have feelings. But though they think and talk endlessly, they have precious little understanding. Especially of their erotic desires which, in Kushner’s world, come off not only as unreasonable but operating entirely against sense. Pill is beloved by a rent boy, Eli. What’s that love about? I don’t even mean why does he love him – I don’t know how anybody answers that – I mean what is their love? How is it shaped? When does it flower? I don’t have the foggiest idea from the play – desire is just a fact. The heart wants what it wants. And this is the way every character talks about desire – why did V, the youngest son, sleep with Maeve, his lesbian sister’s partner? Why did Empty, the sister (oy, the names in this play) sleep with her ex-husband? These erotic escapades certainly have consequences – mostly anger, the emotion Kushner is most comfortable with – but nobody is interested in understanding them. Nobody is interested in empathy, neither for the “cheater” nor for the “cheated on.” Everything is judgment and the evasion thereof. At the end of the play, I didn’t feel I’d learned something important. I was just happy to be rid of these people.

And yet, that kind of strong reaction deserves more excavation. If I just didn’t go for his stuff, that would be that: I wouldn’t go for it. The problem is that at the core, I find an uncomfortable kinship. I’m a head-y person, after all, more comfortable with ideas than with people, and more comfortable with argument and attack than with any other form of discourse. I’m a writer who sometimes struggles for direct access to his character’s feelings, I have an unfortunate tendency to analyze my own work, to think about what this or that action or character or turn means instead of writing from the inside out and letting someone else do the analysis. Kushner wants me to see the greatness of these people’s struggle, to see them as types of tragic heroes, but my only reaction is: there but for the grace of God go I.

I should say a few words about the production. The set is a meticulously accurate recreation of a Carroll Gardens Brooklyn brownstone. For some, this will induce acute nostalgia; for others, acute claustrophobia. I live in Brooklyn now, but I didn’t grow up in this environment; for me, it was just nice to see kitchen-sink realism where the designer knows exactly the right make of sink. (Unlike, say, God of Carnage, the New York version of which was set in the same general vicinity, but whose set suggested confusion on the designer’s part between Cobble Hill and Soho.)

The cast must have worked extremely hard simply to keep control of Kushner’s text, which, in addition to being voluminous, is orchestrated like a four-hour dissonant madrigal, with five, six, even more voices overlapping at once, specific snippets rising to distinct audibility in what I assume is a carefully prescribed sequence – the whole thing requires the kind of perfect timing I associate with a dense farce like Noises Off than I do with a family drama like iHomo. And the work pays off: their timing is uniformly flawless. And, for better or worse, they all fully inhabit their Kushner-world characters.

I hope when the run ended, they all got a chance to go somewhere nice.