It's a good solid article and I think Kushner well deserves the in-depth discussion.

But if I were Larry Kramer...I think I might feel a little, well, short-shrifted.  And I can guarantee you Terence McNally isn't very happy at all. 

There's a quite palpable (if not explicitly expressed) implication that hangs over the piece:  Tony Kushner it It.  And yes indeed he is New Yorker feature article worthy and I'm not being snide there.  He is. 

But there are other people who deserve a bit more than the sidelining that happens here:  Busch and Ludlam. Lanford Wilson. John Guare.  Not political?  I dunno.  There are varying degrees and certainly a couple of these names would go at the bottom.  But I think the gradual emergence of scripts that find their center in gay experience (or simply gay entertainment) from darkness into light and commercial mass-audience runs is political in and of itself.  And this wasn't a one-horse town.  Harvey Fierstein in Torch Song Trilogy at the Little Theater in the early 80's was a political event if there ever was one.  A paradigm shift.  And it was magical.

Just my two cents worth. 

I would say it was his Angels in America performed at the Seattle Repertory Theater that really opened my eyes to what a play can actually achieve, that "something" which is impossible to achieve on the silver screen or on the page.  Of course, it helped that there was a high quality group of actors along with the director.  It does make a difference as another performance I saw of AiA at a university made so clear. 

Which does bring up part of the problem with the theater in this country.  If one doesn't happen to live in New York, or maybe Chicago, one's access to quality performances, both in terms of the text and the performace is rather limited.  Comparing it to film, many people in this country growing up get to see Citizen Kane not directed by Wells but by some undergrad student.  How many of the potential genuises that might have been pulled to the theater as a means of expression drifted away from it because what theater they did see was not very inspiring. 

But I would add that Tony is pretty clear about how he sees Obama and the left and the whole process [emphasis mine]:

But I feel that after Obama’s inauguration the left immediately settled into our very familiar role of being the backseat drivers or principled opposition, and have expressed volubly every disappointment. Not even after the inauguration. The minute they heard that Rick Warren was speaking at the inauguration, LGBT people were saying, ‘It’s over, he’s just like all the others.’ Let alone those who say there’s no difference between Republicans and Democrats, which I think is glib and profoundly dangerous. What frightens me is that I feel that we’re in the process of dismantling the coalition of constituencies that brought Obama to the White House.

My feeling is that there are too many of us on the left who believe that politics is an expression of personal purity. Because of our divorcement from electoral politics and abandonment of a belief in the possibility of radical change through participatory democracy, we have become profoundly uncomfortable with, and ignorant of, the complexities and discomfort of making change in a democracy. I’m guilty of this in some of the earlier things I wrote, too. I have no illusion of being able to change Rush Limbaugh’s mind, or of being able to make John Boehner anything other than a profoundly indecent person, but what makes something happen in an electoral democracy is compromise, negotiation, and strategizing, and to a certain extent even what in the Clinton era became fashionable to call lying. There are lies, and those should not be tolerated. But there is a degree of rhetorical finesse that’s required to maneuver through very treacherous waters. I’m willing to believe that this man who got himself elected president is actually a very skilled politician and is negotiating imponderably difficult conditions.

....And the LGBT community, what are they, we, looking for? Yes, we’ve been asked to wait a very long time, asked to eat oceans of shit by the Democratic Party; we’ve been 75 percent loyal for decades without a wobble and without a whole lot of help from these people. And it’s important that somebody keeps screaming; the trick is how do you scream, and who do you scream to? If we’re dissatisfied with these Democrats, let’s get better ones instead of fantasies about mass uprisings that are going to resemble the October Revolution. Yes, it might sometimes feel good to throw the newspaper across the room. There’s much criticism of Obama that’s legitimate. He backs down on things, he waffles, like on the mosque, and you wince. And I consider his decision to appeal the Federal court ruling abolishing DADT to be unethical, tremendously destructive, and potentially politically catastrophic. But is Obama really supposed to say, as the first African-American president, that same-sex marriage is his first priority? Clearly he believes in it; he’s a constitutional scholar. It’s not conceivable to me that he believes that state-sponsored marriage should be unavailable to same-sex couples, even if he has religious scruples. But do I think he should have lost the election for the chance to say he supported same-sex marriage? No. Given that we would have had John McCain and Sarah Palin, I would have said, ‘Say anything you need to.’ So if he’s moving very cautiously, with two wars he’s inherited and a collapsing global economy and the planet coming unglued—Okay!

Seems to be that Kushner is political realist.  So even when Obama does something that is "unethical, tremendously destructive, and potentially politically catastrophic" he is still supportive because of the larger context of the political environment.  And it seems that Kushner is placing a lot of the responsibility for change on the people of the left to actually get in there in participate in the participatory democracy.  And while I too would like to see what Brecht would think of Obama, I would also be very interested in how he sees the left itself.