KUSHNER, Tony

Nationality: American. Born: New York City, 16 July 1956; grew up in Louisiana. Education: Columbia University, B.A. 1978; New York University, M.F.A. in directing 1984. Career: United Nations switchboard operator, Plaza Hotel, New York, 1979-85; member, Heat & Light Co., Inc., theatre company, 1980s; assistant director, St. Louis Repertory Thea-tre, 1985-86; artistic director, New York Theatre Workshop, 1987-88; beginning 1989 guest artist, New York University Graduate Theatre Program, Yale University, and Princeton University; director of literary services, Theatre Communication Group, New York, 1990-91; playwright-in-residence, Juilliard School of Drama, New York, 1990-92. Awards: National Endowment for the Arts directing fellowship, 1985, 1987, and 1993; Princess Grace award, 1986; New York State Council for the Arts playwriting fellowship, 1987; Arts Council of Great Britain John Whiting award, 1990; Kennedy Center/American Express Fund for New American Plays awards, 1990 and 1992; National Arts Club Kesserling award, Will Glickman playwriting prize, and London Evening Standard award, all in 1992; Pulitzer Prize for drama, Antoinette Perry award for best play, and New York Drama Critics Circle award for best new play, all in 1993, for Millennium Approaches, part one of Angels in America; American Academy of Arts and Letters award, 1994; Antoinette Perry award for best play, 1994, for Perestroika, part two of Angels in America; Lambda Lesbian and Gay Drama award, 1996, for Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness: Essays, a Play, Two Poems, and a Prayer.Agent: Joyce Ketay, 334 West 89th Street, New York, New York 10024, U.S.A. Address: Office: Walter Kerr Theatre, 225 West 48th Street, New York, New York 10036, U.S.A.

Publication

Plays

Yes, Yes, No, No (for children; produced St. Louis, Missouri, 1985). In Three Plays for Young Audiences, 1987.

A Bright Room Called Day (produced New York, 1985). 1991.

Stella, adaptation of the play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (produced New York, 1987).

The Illusion, adaptation of the play by Pierre Corneille (produced New York, 1988; revised version, produced Hartford, Connecticut, 1990). 1991.

Widows, with Ariel Dorfman, adaptation of the work by Dorfman (produced Los Angeles, 1991).

Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Part One: Millennium Approaches (produced San Francisco, 1991). 1993.

Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Part Two: Perestroika (produced New York, 1992). 1994.

Slavs! (Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness). 1995.

A Dybbuk, or between Two Worlds, adaptation of Joachim Neugroschel's translation of the play by S. Ansky (produced New York, 1997). 1997.

The Good Person of Szechuan, adaptation of the play by Bertolt Brecht. 1997.

Henry Box Brown, or the Mirror of Slavery (produced London, 1998).

Hydriotaphia (produced New York, 1998). In Death & Taxes: Hydriotaphia, and Other Plays, 2000.

Death & Taxes: Hydriotaphia, and Other Plays. 2000.

Homebody/Kabul (produced New York, 2001).

Other

A Meditation from Angels in America. 1994.

Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness: Essays, a Play, Two Poems, and a Prayer. 1995.

Tony Kushner in Conversation, edited by Robert Vorlicky. 1997.

*

Critical Studies:

Essays on Kushner's Angels, edited by Per K. Brask, 1995; "'The Angels of Fructification': Tennessee Williams, Tony Kushner, and Images of Homosexuality on the American Stage," in Mississippi Quarterly, 49(1), Winter 1995-96, pp. 13-32, and The Theater of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope, 2001, both by James Fisher; "Angels in America: Tony Kushner's Theses on the Philosophy of History" by Charles McNulty, in Modern Drama, 39, Spring 1996, pp. 84-96; Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America by Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger, 1997; "Angels, Monsters, and Jews: Intersections of Queer and Jewish Identity in Kushner's Angels in America " by Jonathan Freedman, in PMLA, 113, January 1998, pp. 90-102.

* * *

Tony Kushner was born in 1956 in New York City and raised in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where his father ran the family lumberyard. Both of his parents were classical musicians. He attended Columbia University as an undergraduate, studying medieval literature before attending New York University as a directing student. He was a member of the Heat & Light Co., Inc., a theater company in New York City in the 1980s.

Kushner's major plays include Stella (1985), a children's play adapted from Goethe's 1775 prose drama; The Illusion (1988), an adaptation from Pierre Corneille; and Windows (1991), an adaptation cowritten with Ariel Dorfman. Though critically unsuccessful, the 1991 New York production of A Bright Room Called Day nonetheless led to a commission from San Francisco's Eureka Theatre that developed into his acclaimed masterpiece Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1992). Winning near universal acclaim, it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, two Tony awards for best play (for Millennium Approaches, Part One, and Perestroika, Part Two), and a host of other awards. Since then, Kushner has produced Slavs! (Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness) (1994), constructed from material discarded from earlier drafts of Angels in America and which addresses the collapse of Soviet socialism. Other works are Hydriotaphia (written in 1988 and produced in 1998), which presents Sir Thomas Browne, an early historical English capitalist, on his deathbed reviewing his life, and well-received adaptations of Solomon Ansky's The Dybbuk and Bertolt Brecht 's A Good Person of Setzuan, as well as his play Homebody/Kabul (2001).

Kushner's plays are straightforwardly political. He has identified himself as a socialist, a position that at the end of the twentieth century in America marginalized him even more than his open homosexuality. For Kushner the current embrace of the capitalist ethic by American middle-class society was nothing less than a repudiation of the ideals for equality and social justice that propelled America from Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal through Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. During those 30 years America appeared to be on the cusp of becoming a genuinely progressive nation. But after the ousting of Richard Nixon and the onset of economic inflation in the 1970s, the Right made deep inroads into the American political landscape, inroads that would have seemed unlikely in the more liberal 1960s. But with the Ronald Reagan/George Bush administrations, bit by bit social programs became dismantled and diluted as the Left, both Old and New, appeared to lose its voice and become complicit in the Right's victory.

The Holocaust did not exterminate Jews alone, and homosexuals and Communists were also among those condemned. As a Jew, a homosexual, and a socialist, Kushner was well positioned to analyze how the voices of each group have been silenced in other communities. His commitment to political and social activism has continued to lead him to protest the moral bankruptcy he sees as pervading American society, as well as to celebrate the moral, artistic, and intellectual achievements of each group. Though Kushner has cautioned his audience/readers not to despair and even to exult in the resistance offered by these groups, his message is perhaps best articulated by Zillah, his paranoid conscience in A Bright Room Called Day, when she advises the audience not to sleep too soundly and to listen to its nightmares.

—Steven Dedalus Burch

See the essay on A Bright Room Called Day.