(Minneapolis) When Tony Kushner agreed to premiere a new play at the Guthrie Theater, the artistic director at the Minneapolis theater wanted to know what it would be called.

Kushner, who hadn’t yet decided what to write about, responded with a mouthful of a title that had been knocking around in his head for more than a decade: “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures.”

“Joe Dowling needed a title, and I figured well, I can make this play about absolutely anything and somehow or another, that title will carry it,” Kushner said sipping a late afternoon cappuccino during a break from a hectic rehearsal schedule for the new play.

The new play is about “sexuality, and the housing market, and religion, and Marxism, and stuff like that,” Kushner said. “It’s a very complicated text, so I don’t know how to explain it beyond that.”

A new work from the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning dramatist behind “Angels in America” is an event in American theater and a coup for the Guthrie. Long a leader in America’s regional theater scene, the Guthrie moved to expensive, sprawling new digs along the Mississippi River in 2006, and its leaders were looking for the right moment to turn over its three stages and ample public spaces to celebrating the work of a single dramatist.

Dowling said Kushner was his first choice as “the pre-eminent dramatist of our time.” Kushner signed on, he said, out of allegiance to the regional theater movement that helped spark his own career – “Angels” debuted in San Francisco before moving to Broadway.

Thus was born the Guthrie’s “Kushner Celebration.” Besides the new play, it includes a two-month production of his musical “Caroline, or Change,” the staging of a series of his short plays dubbed “Tiny Kushner,” and panel discussions, speeches and seminars on his work. You can even buy T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Intelligent Homosexual” in the Guthrie gift shop.

It’s quite a salute to a playwright whom Dowling called “not really a household name. Hopefully, we can help change that.”

Kushner hasn’t debuted a finished new play since the Tony-nominated “Caroline, or Change” in 2002, though he’s been plenty busy.

He won an Emmy Award for adapting “Angels” into a six-hour miniseries for HBO in 2003, co-wrote the Steven Spielberg film “Munich” and has been working on another script for an upcoming Spielberg film about Abraham Lincoln. He worked on adaptations and translations of other playwrights’ works, and always a vocal leftist, took up passionate criticism of the Bush administration.

But once Kushner signed on with the Guthrie, he actually had to sit down and write a new play.

Kushner copped the wordy title from a book he found among his late grandmother’s things after she died in the early 1990s: “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism,” written in 1928 by the playwright and socialist George Bernard Shaw. It served as a nice jumping-off point for a new play that’s about people losing faith in the beliefs and personal relationships that once anchored their lives – themes Kushner said resonate more personally as he’s gotten older.

“This is a play about how you proceed when all the old theories have failed,” said Kathleen Chalfant, one of the stars of “The Intelligent Homosexual” and an “Angels in America” veteran.

Set in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood over one long weekend in 2007, “The Intelligent Homosexual” is about three Italian-American siblings – two of them gay – who gather to deal with their suicidal 75-year-old father, a longtime widower and retired union longshoreman who’s watched his leftist belief system rendered irrelevant over the years.

Chalfant plays the old man’s sister, a former Carmelite nun who got swept up in revolutionary South American politics in the 1980s, and now lives and works among the poor in a New Jersey housing project. Two other Kushner vets, Stephen Spinella (”Angels in America”) and Linda Emond (”Homebody/Kabul”) play two of the three children.

“On one hand it’s a very psychological family drama that’s about how siblings relate, how they vie for the attention of parents,” said the play’s director, Michael Greif, another longtime Kushner associate. “And then on the other hand it’s about people who have lost their way in the world, who’ve come unmoored from the things they relied upon in a radically changing world.”

It’s also Kushner’s first real “gay play” since the landmark “Angels in America,” a sweeping epic about AIDS, the closet, religion, politics and yes, angels, that debuted on Broadway in 1993. The gay rights movement has seen setbacks but also big advances since “Angels” first debuted, some just in the last few weeks as several states in quick succession legalized gay marriage either through the courts or the legislature.

Kushner, now 52, has also seen his life change a lot in that time. He started writing “Angels” around the time he came out of the closet, and today has been with his partner for more than a decade. They exchanged wedding vows in 2004, but as New York residents have not yet been able to legally marry.

“We’ve seen unbelievable gains in an unbelievably short time, and against the terrible odds of AIDS, which was a catastrophe on so many levels that might easily have dismantled an embattled social movement,” Kushner said.

Kushner, whose outspoken liberalism has prompted him to call conservatism a “thought disorder,” said he’d prefer that gay marriage be implemented nationwide by a Supreme Court ruling rather than “having to fight this thing state by state for the next 10 years.”

As for links between “The Intelligent Homosexual” and “Angels in America,” Kushner said they share some themes but that the new play is more intimate and less filled with “liberational energy.” It’s shorter, too, running just a little more than three hours.

“This is a much more middle-aged play,” said Kushner. “I think because of things that are happening in my own life – an aging father, aging friends and my own aging body – it seemed like it was the right moment for this.”

So about that title. “There is something kind of ridiculous about it,” he said. But in the term “Intelligent Homosexual” he sensed an interesting contradiction between the mind and the body.

“Everybody has trouble thinking their way through sex and thinking about sex and the way the body expresses itself and gets and gives pleasure,” Kushner said. “The relationship of intelligence to pleasure and life, which is not an easy relationship, is something I was interested in exploring.”