| In
“After Angels,” a profile of Tony Kushner published
in The New Yorker, John Lahr wrote: “[Kushner]
is fond of quoting Melville’s heroic prayer from Mardi
and Voyage Thither (“Better to sink in boundless deeps
than float on vulgar shoals”), and takes an almost carnal
glee in tackling the most difficult subjects in contemporary
history – among them, AIDS and the conservative counter-revolution
(Angels
In America), Afghanistan and the West (Homebody/Kabul),
German Fascism and Reaganism (A
Bright Room Called Day), the rise of capitalism (Hydriotaphia,
or the Death of Dr. Browne), and racism and the civil rights
movement in the South (Caroline,
or Change). But his plays, which are invariably political,
are rarely polemical. Instead Kushner rejects ideology in favor
of what he calls “a dialectically shaped truth,”
which must be “outrageously funny” and “absolutely
agonizing,” and must “move us forward.” He
gives voice to characters who have been rendered powerless by
the forces of circumstances – a drag queen dying of AIDS,
an uneducated Southern maid, contemporary Afghans – and
his attempt to see all sides of their predicament has a sly
subversiveness. He forces the audience to identify with the
marginalized – a humanizing act of the imagination.”
Born in New York City
in 1956, and raised in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Kushner is best
known for his two-part epic, Angels
in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.
His other plays include A
Bright Room Called Day, Slavs!;
Hydrotaphia;Homebody/Kabul;
and Caroline
or Change, the musical for which he wrote book
and lyrics, with music by composer Jeanine Tesori. Kushner has
translated and adapted Pierre Corneille's The
Illusion, S.Y. Ansky's The
Dybbuk, Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of
Sezuan and Mother Courage and Her Children; and the
English-language libretto for the children’s opera Brundibár
by Hans Krasa. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols’
film of Angels
In America, and Steven Spielberg’s Munich.
His books include But
the Giraffe, a Curtain Raising, and Brundibar: the Libretto,
with illustrations by Maurice Sendak; The
Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present; and Wrestling
with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Palestinian/Israeli
Conflict, co-edited with Alisa Solomon.
Kushner is the recipient
of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an Emmy Award, two Tony Awards,
three Obie Awards, an Oscar nomination, an Arts Award from the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, the PEN/Laura Pels Award
for a Mid-Career Playwright, a Spirit of Justice Award from
the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, and a Cultural
Achievement Award from The National Foundation for Jewish Culture,
among many others. Most recently, Caroline
or Change, produced in the autumn of 2006 at
the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain, received the Evening
Standard Award, the London Drama Critics’ Circle Award
and the Olivier Award for Best Musical. He is the subject of
a documentary film, Wrestling
with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner, made by the
Oscar-winning filmmaker Freida Lee Mock. He is working on a
screenplay about Abraham Lincoln. He lives in Manhattan with
his husband, Mark Harris.
•••
“Tony Kushner
is a dramatist through and through. Even when he is delivering
a lecture or writing an essay, other voices break in, all smart,
some smart-aleck, in a slaphappy polyphony, as he badgers himself
(and others) into shrewd judgments... The results are funny,
harsh and wise.”
—Garry Wills
“Some playwrights
want to change the world. Some want to revolutionize theater.
Tony Kushner is that rarity of rarities: a writer who has the
promise to do both.”
—The New York
Times
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