Tony Kushner

Dramatist

• Born: July 16, 1956
• Place of Birth: New York, New York

Kushner became a prominent playwright withAngels in America, a seven-hour-long play that addressed such issues as homosexuality, social oppression, hypocritical politics, and Judaism.

Early Life

Tony Kushner was born to middle-class parents—both musicians—in New York in 1956. Two years after Kushner’s birth, he and his family moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana. They may have moved because Kushner’s father inherited a lumberyard; his parents then devoted themselves to this business, no longer pursuing their creative ambitions. Lake Charles is outside the greater New Orleans area, so Kushner lived in distinctly suburban surroundings. Growing up as a Jew in the American South during the years of the civil rights protests and the arrival of desegregation—the most massive changes the region had seen for a century—affected Kushner’s vision of social justice and gave him imaginative access to rural and conservative America. Moreover, the residual anti-Semitism of certain aspects of Southern life, combined with the inescapable reality that Jews were far more privileged than African Americans, fostered Kushner’s American and unabashedly Jewish identity.

Kushner excelled at Lake Charles High School, where he was on the debate team—possibly foreshadowing the argumentative, political soliloquies so prominent in his plays. Seeing his mother perform as Linda Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) opened his eyes to the possibility of theater, and Miller’s psychologically compelling drama, though far less experiential than Kushner’s, can be seen as a precedent for his work. An important mentor for Kushner was Gloria Wegener, who taught him both in high school and in a program at McNeese State University. It was in Wegener’s Latin class that Kushner wrote his first play, an untitled short sketch written entirely in the Latin language.

Kushner’s high school study of Latin heightened his interest in the distant past, and in college—at Columbia University in New York—Kushner majored in medieval studies, with an emphasis on art and literature, studies that display themselves, for instance, in the medieval ancestry of the character of Prior Walter in Kushner’s play Angels in America (1991). Rather than going on to graduate school in the field, Kushner chose to attend New York University’s school of drama. He was influenced by playwrights quite different from Miller: such postmodern experimentalists as JoAnne Akalaitis and Richard Foreman. The philosophical interests of these artists and their link with contemporary interdisciplinary thought instilled in Kushner a sense of the possible breadth of theater, even though he was always far more interested in psychology and narrative than the New York avant-garde of this era.

Life’s Work

After graduating from drama school, Kushner devoted himself to writing plays. Often, this was combined with hands-on directing and adaptation, as in the work he did for a summer theater program in Lake Charles. His first full-length play, A Bright Room Called Day (1985), was one of the few works produced in the 1980s to make an explicit connection between the atmosphere surrounding the politics of the Ronald Reagan administration and those of the Adolf Hitler regime that came to power in 1930s Germany. Using a recursive structure of foreground and background he repeated in his 2001 play Homebody/Kabul, Kushner produced a compelling political piece that was largely ignored by the mainstream press.

In 1990, Angels in America was commissioned by the Centre Theater Group at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and subsequently previewed and workshopped at various regional theaters before premiering on Broadway in 1993, at which point it met with universal acclaim. The play was seven hours long, and the first part, Millennium Approaches (1991), established the play’s concepts and characters; the second part, Perestroika (1992), was being written hastily until its production. The hypocrisy of the 1980s—both New York lawyer Roy Cohn and his disciple, the Mormon Joe Pitt, are closeted homosexuals who will not admit their sexual preferences, even though they support a conservative politics that often exhibits an antihomosexual bias—counterpoints the spiritual revelations experienced by Prior, a man suffering from acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and abandoned by his lover, Lewis. Unlike many Jewish intellectuals of the generation preceding him, Kushner was not rigidly secular and modern in his outlook; though not professing an Orthodox creed, he was interested in spirituality and sought to enact an awareness of it on stage. The title Angels in America indicated Kushner’s wrestling with his spiritual heritage, and his reliance on the philosophy of the German Jewish literary critic Walter Benjamin, whose idea of the angel of history provided the inspiration for much of the symbolic role of angels in the play, indicated a sensitivity to the sacred as a part of the Jewish American experience.

Kushner’s subsequent work continued to explore his characteristic themes. Caroline, or Change (2003), a musical for which he wrote the book, explored the experiences of an African American maid in the pre-civil rights South and was inspired by Kushner’s boyhood in Lake Charles. Kushner’s penchant for timeliness was revealed in 2001, when his play Homebody/Kabul, concerning a British housewife and her strange relationship to turmoil in Afghanistan, was given extraordinary pertinence by the attacks of September 11. Kushner also wrote the screenplay for Steven Spielberg's Munich (2005), a film about Israel’s pursuit of revenge against the terrorists who attacked Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. In 2003, Kushner married his longtime companion Mark Harris.

After the premiere of his play The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Captialism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures in 2009, Kushner began focusing more on film. He teamed up with Spielberg once more for 2012's Lincoln, a critically acclaimed biopic which garnered twelve Academy Award nominations and two wins. Kushner's screenplay, specifically, won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for best screenplay and the Writers' Guild of America's Paul Selvin Award. In 2015 actor and producer Viola Davis announced that she had hired Kushner to write a screenplay for a film about the life of Barbara Jordan, in which she planned to star, and Kushner said he was working on a third screenplay with Spielberg as well. The artist continued to collaborate with Spielberg for his 2022 film The Fabelmans, which went on to receive seven Academy Award nominations.

Significance

Kushner received kudos from such storied critics as Harold Bloom, who generally opposed identity politics and academic “queer theory” but found Kushner’s theatrical renditions of such issues praiseworthy. Kushner is a playwright of ideas and of character: Angels in America characters such as Harper Pitt, the troubled wife of Joe, and Belize, a former drag queen, are among the most unforgettable in American theater. Literary critic George Steiner once commented that Judaism and homosexuality together made up the distinguishing aspects of the modern writer; he was thinking about artists who had one or the other attribute, although some, like Marcel Proust, had both. In his professional and personal life, Kushner exhibits pride in both his gay and his Jewish identities, defying their long centuries of marginality and oppression. In 2024, following a Grammy Award nomination for Best Musical Theater Album for Caroline, or Change, Kushner joined the ranks of a small number of artists who have been nominated for all four major American entrainment awards.

Bibliography

Al-Badri, Hussein. Tony Kushner's Postmodern Theatre: A Study of Political Discourse. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2014. Print.

Fisher, James. The Theater of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope. London: Routledge, 2001. Print.

Fisher, James. Tony Kushner: New Essays on the Art and Politics of the Plays. Jefferson: McFarland, 2005. Print.

King, Emily. “The Overlooked Jewish Identity of Roy Cohn in Kushner’s Angels in America: American Schmucko.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 27 (2008): 87-100. Print.

Kushner, Tony. "A Master Class with 'Angels in America' Playwright Tony Kushner." Interview by Scott Porch. Daily Beast. Daily Beast, 21 June 2015. Web. 25 Sept. 2015.

Nielsen, Ken. Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. London: Continuum, 2008. Print.

Pederson, Joshua. “’More Life’ and More: Harold Bloom, the J Writer, and the Archaic Judaism of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.” Contemporary Literature 50.3 (2009): 576-98. Print.

Pressley, Nelson. American Playwriting and the Anti-Political Prejudice: Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Perspectives. New York: Palgrave, 2014. Print.

"Tony Kushner." Steven Barclay Agency, 2024, www.barclayagency.com/speakers/tony-kushner. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.

Vorlicky, Robert, ed. Tony Kushner in Conversation. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1998. Print.