'Angels In America,' 20 Years Later : NPR 'Angels In America,' 20 Years Later Embed Embed 'Angels In America,' 20 Years Later 'Angels In America,' 20 Years Later Embed Embed Emma Thompson starred in HBO's adaptation of Tony Kushner's play Angels in America. Stephen Goldblatt/AP/HBO hide caption toggle caption Emma Thompson starred in HBO's adaptation of Tony Kushner's play Angels in America. Stephen Goldblatt/AP/HBO Two decades ago, in 1991, the first part of an ambitious work of theater by playwright Tony Kushner took the stage in San Francisco. It was called Angels in America, and its two parts — Millennium Approaches and Perestroika — clocked in at an epic seven hours. The work, about AIDS in the age of Ronald Reagan, shocked many for its obscenities, and blunt portrayal of sex and homosexuality. But the play was also a story, told with drama and humor, of how humans change and how society responds to those changes. Angels in America debuted on Broadway in 1993. Since then, it has been transformed into an opera and an HBO miniseries.

It won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993. Tony Kushner joins NPR's Neal Conan to reflect on the era in which he wrote Angels in America. He discusses how American society has changed over the past two decades, as well as his play's appeal to young people. Interview Highlights On the mood in America when he wrote the play "The sense of the world in the late '80s when I started thinking about the play, and in the early '90s when I wrote it — it was a lot more of a millennial consciousness than an apocalyptic consciousness. There was a strong anticipation. I was a medieval studies major when I was at Columbia, and I was sort of trained to think a lot about millennia. And everyone on the planet, of course, in the late '80s and early '90s, [was] waiting for the year 2000 to arrive. You know, the Y2K virus and all that. There was a certain amount of postmodern versions of old medieval tropes regarding millennia, and a sense that when this sort of auspicious or forbidding date arrived, there would be some sort of transformation — something big was about to happen ... Article continues after sponsorship "During ...

the Reagan years, there was a sort of sea change taking place in American politics — and then, as it turned out, in European politics as well, and ultimately in global politics, that we were entering a new period where old reliables were going to be overthrown, and a new way of looking at the world was at hand. And it wasn't necessarily an appealing way of looking at the world, at least for me. ... There was a sense that something was coming and it might be something great, and might be something terrible ... "I feel, going back now, that the early '90s, the late '80s, for all the horrors of the AIDS epidemic, were comparatively innocent and carefree times compared to where we are now. In the mid-'80s when I wrote the play, it included things about 'eco-cide,' about the collapse of the ozone layer. I really didn't believe in my heart of hearts that the human race was now threatening the survival of life on the planet. There's now absolutely no doubt that that's the case. ... It's completely clear that what we were beginning to get worried about in the '80s was very serious and very real things ...

so the play, and the times, both feel darker to me now than they did back then." On high schools and colleges performing the play "It's great that it's taught and performed in colleges. I still have to admit ... it's a little shocking — I grew up in Lake Charles, La., and went to public high school, where ... Shakespeare was considered OK, but not Romeo and Juliet because that was kind of naughty. ... But we were certainly protected from anything that was too overtly sexual. And the play is fairly blunt about how it deals with issues of sexuality. "So every once in a while I express concern when I hear from a high school teacher who says that they're teaching it. But the high school teacher usually rolls his or her eyes. ... You know, I don't have kids myself, so I clearly have not been spending enough time around teenagers to realize that things have changed in the last 40 years, whenever it was I was a teenager. I think people are a little less impressionable and a little harder to shock. "It makes me enormously happy that I think one of the largest constituencies for the play at this point are members of a younger generation ...

I don't know how that happened, but if the play appeals to young people, that makes me very proud." On colleges that bristle at the play's controversial subject matter "The play is a really good target for people ... because you can pull quotes out of it and make it sound like it's just a piece of pornography, and get unenlightened people really freaked out about it. ... It's always going to have its uses for these kind of people. "But I think that one thing that's enormously important is that when the administration in these universities stands up to the regents ... if the administration doesn't stampede, if it doesn't get scared, if it stands up for academic freedom, the other side caves very quickly. And the cases where the controversy has really gotten nuts have often been places where the administration was ... afraid of controversy." On progress on gay rights since Angels was first performed "There's been immense progress in terms of [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] rights, obviously, and we're in a very different place now [than] we were in the early '90s. And in my lifetime, I've seen unbelievable progress.

And I have great optimism and absolute certainty that we're going to become fully enfranchised and protected by the 14th Amendment and so on. But in the meanwhile, we're not there yet. And there's still a tremendous amount of homophobia." Tony Kushner - IMDb IMDb 17 January 2017 4:34 PM, UTC NEWS Writer | Soundtrack | Actor Tony Kushner's play "Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes" earned him the Pulitzer Prize, among many other awards. His other acclaimed plays include "Slavs", "Homebody/Kabul" and "Caroline, or Change". He has collaborated with children's author and illustrator Maurice Sendak on several books. In 2003, Kushner married his boyfriend,...

See full bio » Born: a list of 42 people created 30 Jun 2011 a list of 22 people created 19 Sep 2012 a list of 49 people created 14 Jan 2013 a list of 10 people created 19 Sep 2014 a list of 970 people created 11 months ago Do you have a demo reel? Add it to your IMDbPage How much of Tony Kushner's work have you seen? User Polls Nominated for 2 Oscars. Another 24 wins & 32 nominations. See more awards » Known For 2004 Angels in America (TV Movie) (based on the play by) Angels in America (TV Mini-Series) (play - 5 episodes, 2003) (teleplay - 2 episodes, 2003) - Part 1: Millennium Approaches (2003) ...

(play) / (teleplay) 1993 American Playhouse (TV Series) (play "Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes" - 1 episode) - In the Wings: Angels in America on Broadway (1993) ...

(play "Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes") Hide Soundtrack (2 credits) 2007 ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway (Documentary) (lyrics: "Caroline, or Change - Epilogue", "Dotty and Caroline", "Gonna Pass Me a Law", "Noah Go to Sleep", "Laundry Finish", "Lot's Wife", "Moon Trio", "Roosevelt Petrucius Coleslaw", "Stuart and Noah") / (performer: "Caroline, or Change - Epilogue") 2004 The 58th Annual Tony Awards (TV Special) (lyrics: "Lot's Wife") Hide 2013 Spotlight on Broadway (TV Series) Himself 2013 The Journey to Lincoln (Video documentary short) Himself - Screenwriter 2001-2013 Charlie Rose (TV Series) Himself - Guest 2012 Moyers & Company (TV Series) Himself 2012 The Colbert Report (TV Series) Himself - Guest 2011-2012 Democracy Now!

(TV Series) Himself 2009 Looking for Lincoln (TV Movie) Himself 2008 The Jewish Americans (TV Mini-Series documentary) Himself 2006 Munich: The Experience (Video documentary short) Himself 2006 Munich: The Mission - The Team (Video documentary short) Himself 1999-2006 American Experience (TV Series documentary) Himself 1993-2004 Working in the Theatre (TV Series documentary) Himself 1999 New York: A Documentary Film (TV Series documentary) Himself - Commentator 1993 American Playhouse (TV Series) Himself 2013 Democracy Now! (TV Series) Himself 2008 La mandrágora (TV Series) Himself Personal Details Other Works: His play, "Homebody/Kabul," was performed at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, Illinois with Amy Morton in the cast. See more » Publicity Listings: 1 Print Biography | 3 Interviews | 8 Articles | See more » Height: Did You Know?

Personal Quote: [on his Oscar nomination for Munich (2005) screenplay] We had a great time because we sort of knew we weren't going to win anything; we were just there for the fun of it. I got to meet a lot of people whose work I really admire. I was very moved to see) Larry McMurtry and to see him and his partner [ Diana Ossana ] win for Brokeback Mountain (2005). And we stayed at the Pavilion, and they made a ... See more » Trivia: His play, "Slavs!," at the Mark Taper Forum Theatre in Los Angeles, California was awarded the 1995 Drama Logue Award for Outstanding Production. See more » Star Sign: Tony Kushner | Mother Jones Tony Kushner Email Tony Kushner, a gay Jewish socialist who was raised in Louisiana, won a Pulitzer Prize and two Tony Awards for his two-part, seven-hour Broadway production of Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Other plays, A Bright Room Called Day (1985) and Slavs! (1994), are also concerned with the moral responsibilities of people in politically repressive times.

Such concerns may be especially relevant in America today, where, as he observes: "What used to be called liberal is now called radical, what used to be called radical is now called insane, what used to be called reactionary is now called moderate, and what used to be called insane is now called solid conservative thinking." Q: Angels in America opened on Broadway just months after the Clinton inauguration. It ends with a very hopeful speech about healing. Do you still feel that hope? A: You have to have hope. It's irresponsible to give false hope, which I think a lot of playwrights are guilty of. But I also think it's irresponsible to simply be a nihilist, which quite a lot of playwrights, especially playwrights younger than me, have become guilty of. I don't believe you would bother to write a play if you really had no hope. That passage was one of the very first things I ever wrote when I was working on Angels. I read it to the woman who I was originally writing the part of the angel for, who died of breast cancer before the play was finished. In one of my last conversations with her, she told me that she thought about that image a lot and that she hoped I would include it in the play.

I think I wouldn't have included it otherwise, but I'm glad I did now. Q: Angels in America was a political play--and that's something Americans and critics frequently resist. How did you overcome that resistance? A. What I found in the audience response is a huge hunger for political issues and political discussion. So I always wonder: Is it that Americans don't like politics, or is it that so much theater that is political isn't well-done? One of the things I learned in Slavs! is that it's much easier to talk about being gay than it is to talk about being a socialist. People are afraid of socialism, and plays that deal with economics are scarier to them. I'll learn more about that--my next three plays are all about money. Also, Angels is very entertaining. It does things formally that are new, and people were excited by the size and the scope. It's a good play and that makes all the difference. Thelma and Louise, for instance, is a really terrific movie, and genuinely left in its political sensibilities. It's well-made, so the fact that it is unquestionably coming from a feminist perspective didn't make it absolutely marginal the way you would expect such a film to be.

It had guns--that probably helped. Q: People loved Forrest Gump, too. A. People shouldn't trust artists and they shouldn't trust art. Part of the fun of art is that it invites you to interpret it. There's a very complicated relationship between form and content and between aesthetics and politics. Good politics will produce good aesthetics, really good politics will produce really good aesthetics, and really good aesthetics, if somebody's really asking the hard questions and answering them honestly, they'll probably produce truth, which is to say progressive politics. Q: Is it hard to write characters that are not caricatures and to overcome the barrier that people have about listening to politics from a character on stage? A: I think that a character's politics have to live in the same sort of relationship to the character's psyche that people's politics live in relationship to their own psyches. People are never consistent. People will always do surprising things, both good and bad, and the way that people surprise themselves and their audience are the most interesting moments of human behavior. The space between what we'd like to be and what we actually are is where you find out the most interesting things. Q: Do you see your plays as part of a political movement? A: I do.

I would hate to write anything that wasn't. I would like my plays to be of use to progressive people. I think preaching to the converted is exactly what art ought to do. I am happiest when people who are politically engaged in the world say, "Your play meant a lot to me; it helped me think about something, or made me feel like I wasn't the only person who felt this way." It's the way you feel when you go to a demo, which is the only way to keep sane a lot of the time. You need to remind yourself there are many bodies who are as angry about something as you are. When I teach writing, I always tell my students you should assume that the audience you're writing for is smarter than you. You can't write if you don't think they're on your side, because then you start to yell at them or preach down to them. Q: The character Prelapsarianov--the "world's oldest living Bolshevik"--gives the same speech in both Angels and Slavs!: "How are we to proceed without theory? Is it enough to reject the past, is it wise to move forward in this blind fashion, without the cold brilliant light of theory to guide the way?...

You who live in this sour little age cannot imagine the sheer grandeur of the prospect we gazed upon." A: In both Perestroika [part two of Angels] and Slavs!, the whole play proceeds from the question: If you don't know where you're going, can you move? And do you even have a choice, or do you just dive in and work it out as you're going? That speech came out of a fight I had with my friend Oskar Eustis about Gorbachev. Oskar's point, which became the basis of Prelapsarianov's speech, is that if you don't have a theory to start with--Gorbachev pretended to be about democratic socialism but actually sort of was and sort of wasn't; he was also sort of about preserving the Communist Party power elite--what do you do? It's one of those big conundrums. Q: So what do you do? A: You can't stay back. The fundamental question is: Are we made by history or do we make history--and the answer is yes. I was rereading Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte recently.

The whole tradition in socialist struggle is looking to the past for an antecedent form upon which the present revolutionary response is to be modeled. We may need to stop doing that. Q: Why does the play Slavs! end with the question: "What is to be done?" A: I wanted someone to ask the question: What if this really is the end of history? What if there really is literally nothing to be done, and we're simply stuck with capitalism--although I don't really think it is a possibility. I still believe in a dialectical ordering of the universe. There is a dynamic principle at work--it isn't always mechanically moving things toward the good, but there's always either some sort of progress or decay. And there's too much misery in the world. That is not something that can hold. Q: What do you think is to be done? A: I'm 38 now. One of the painful rites of passage that everyone on the left goes through is to realize it's a lifelong struggle. What we're dealing with from Nixon on as a counter-reaction to the '60s is a very widespread, long-term historical trend. It's going to take many years and probably a few decades to reverse.

People need to be willing to take an issue that they feel passionately about, address themselves to it as extensively as they are capable of and build common cause between issue groups. Everybody on the left needs to start talking about how to create, first on local levels and eventually on a national level, a third party or at least a party that could establish some kind of position in Congress. That's the eternal dream of the left. Q: You think there's no hope for revitalizing the Democratic Party? A: It's a waste of time at this point. There's a famous story about Paul Wellstone refusing to shake Jesse Helms' hand and being chastised by everyone in the Senate because he wouldn't do it--he was told this is a gentlemen's club where we're all colleagues. That's what's wrong. Q: One of the characters in A Bright Room Called Day keeps saying--as Nazism progressively snatches power and the Weimar Republic falls--that each turn for the worse would be the essential spur for people to rise up and oppose fascism. That didn't happen. Do you see parallels today?

A: You don't want to be opportunistic about it and say, "Oh, goody, millions of people are going to be thrown out of their homes--now we'll really get things cooking." It's like people saying the AIDS epidemic helped organize the gay and lesbian community. Q: Speaking of which, there's a lot of discussion now about the second wave of the AIDS epidemic, and about gay men not practicing safer sex. Where do you weigh in? A: It's very difficult to ask people to abstain from pleasure indefinitely, especially sexual erotic pleasure, which is so incredibly important to human beings and the enjoyment of which among homosexuals is so much of a political battlefield. There is absolutely no question that safer sex is not as gratifying and that given all the despair and the unbelievably imponderable weight of loss that the community has had to deal with, self-destructive behaviors are going to be engaged in. Q: Do you think the gay community should be discussing this publicly? A: Of course it's going to be discussed publicly. But you have to be smart. When you make a public utterance you are responsible for being responsible.

We're still an embattled community, and if you're stupid about it you'll give aid to the enemy. Q: Do you have that conundrum as a playwright? A: You have to say: What am I feeding into? I think you should ask yourself that question and then make the decision based on the answers you come up with. I regret having made the only black person in Angels a nurse; that was an inept thing to do. I was very scared about writing a play where there's a couple, one has AIDS and the other walks out. I thought, this is transgressive and scary and am I going to become public enemy number one in the gay community for having written a character like Louis? On the other hand, you have to be willing to scare the horses. You have to be interesting and you have to be daring and you have to be willing to write things that shock. Shock is part of art. Art that's polite is not much fun. Andrea Bernstein writes frequently about politics and culture. She lives in New York.

Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner A SANDERS & MOCK/ AMERICAN FILM FOUNDATION PRODUCTION “WRESTLING WITH ANGELS: PLAYWRIGHT TONY KUSHNER” A FILM BY FREIDA LEE MOCK COMPOSER JEANINE TESORI EDITOR ANNE STEIN ASSOCIATE PRODUCER BRITTANY SANDERS PHOTOGRAPHED BY BESTOR CRAM, DON LENZER, EDDIE MARRITZ, CHRIS PAUL AND TERRY SANDERS SPECIAL THANKS TO STEFAN HAGEN AND TODD SHOTZ EXECUTIVE PRODUCER TERRY SANDERS WRITTEN, PRODUCED AND DIRECTED BY FREIDA LEE MOCK MAJOR FUNDING MADE POSSIBLE BY A GRANT FROM THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS, HELEN AND PETER BING AND MORGAN B. LEE Wrestling With Angels is a feature documentary film about the Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning playwright Tony Kushner.

It tells the story about the evolution of an artist and of how Kushner, raised in the Deep South in Lake Charles, Louisiana, would become an outspoken activist, a compassionate spokesperson for outsiders, and one of today’s most entertaining and important playwrights. At its core the film explores the mystery of creativity, and its source, and Kushner’s compelling plays that are set against the morral and political concerns of our times. Directed by Freida Lee Mock, who also wrote and directed the Academy Award®-winning documentary Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision HBO: Angels in America: Interview: Tony Kushner Angels in America What effect did writing "Angels in America" have on your life? Tony Kushner It changed everything in my life. I mean, it gave me a kind of a freedom and chance to really concentrate on my work, in terms of economic security, and it was overwhelming in the amount of attention that it got. I was given a kind of platform for political talk that I didn't have before because I'd written a famous play. And that was fun because I'm somebody who's interested in politics and political talk and political action.... HBO Can you describe the process of getting the play made into a film?

Tony Kushner I don't believe that every play must be made into a movie in order to prove its worth. Cary (Brokaw, the executive producer of the play) ...asked me, can I show this to Mike Nichols and I said, "well of course, that would be thrilling, but I can't imagine that he is going to want to do it." ...And I was thrilled that he wanted to do it, and we met and talked and we really got along, as we have continued to get along. I think he's an amazing man. ...anybody who really knows what they're talking about is going to say Mike Nichols and HBO pulled off a kind of a miracle here. This could so easily have not worked, and it worked because everybody committed themselves to it so ferociously, and, astonishingly, without any friction. HBO Did adapting the play into a film give you more opportunities as an artist? Tony Kushner I made some mistakes that I think people make when they start out writing screenplays. I thought, you know, I have to give the camera angle, and I failed geometry and I don't have any idea of how to do that.

It's not something I've ever thought about...but I always felt that was part of what a screenplay is, you have to construct the shots. (And Mike Nichols) said, don't do that. That's what I do. That's what the D.P. does. That's what the designer does. You give us the story and the dialogue and then we'll make that stuff up. ...And there are things that you couldn't do in a play that you can do on film, obviously. I learned about the difference in language. A lot of language from the play was preserved, but I learned that not all of it could be because of the intimacy of the screen experience... you don't have the kind of cooling distance of a theatre space. You don't have an audience watching, (and the need to) sort of refocus its attention over and over again... (Mike) wanted to have Al and Emma play all these different people. Just like we did in the play.

And I thought immediately, okay, this is somebody who gets that there's something in this story about that kind of dream-like thing of seeing the same actors playing different people, giving you the opportunity to think about the similarities...what is the connection between a nurse who keeps telling a patient, "stay put," and an angel who's saying the same thing. Why is Emma playing both of those parts? And also, it keeps you thinking critically. It engages you in a different part of your brain because you watch Meryl Streep play Ethel Rosenberg and she's astoundingly moving and scary and great, and you're also watching Meryl Streep playing Hanna. I love that, and that's what you get in theatre that you secretly don't get in movies. ...I think there's value to the power of a really, sort of almost overwhelmingly convincing illusion that's sometimes both working and not working at the same time, and I think that's what theatre is about. ...You believe it and don't believe it simultaneously, which engages a certain part of your brain that has to do with being skeptical about the nature of what you're experiencing in life. That's why theater is important.

You learn to go out into the world after you see a play that you really loved and look at politics and love and all sorts of other human phenomena in the same way. It's real and yet it isn't. HBO Do you have a favorite moment from making the film? Tony Kushner I constantly had a kind of "I can't believe this is happening" (feeling). It still happens to me. When I did a Newsweek interview and I'm in a room with Emma Thompson and Al Pacino and Meryl Streep and Justin Kirk and Mike Nichols, and I feel like, what the hell am I doing here? Everyone's sitting there talking to Meryl and I'm thinking, this can't really be happening. When we filmed the last scene, the epilogue. And it was January. And it was scheduled weeks in advance that we would be filming on the set of the Bethesda fountain. And we all went down and filmed it, and it was literally exactly the day that I had written about.

I wrote that last scene in Perestroika, sitting on the head of the fountain, on a day in January when the sun was out but it was cold at the same time, and the sky was incredibly blue, and it was unbelievably beautiful and chilly and all those things. And as a matter of fact, I think I just wrote that day into the scene, and many years later, fifteen years later, whatever it was, we got together to film this last scene and God and nature cooperated and we had the exact day that the screenplay is describing, it's like, there it was. And it was just so astonishingly moving. We shot it in very few takes. And the way that it was set up, I'd been watching it on the monitor and I thought, these people are so smart. And that last shot of them going up the stairs and everything... We sort of finished the shot at the end of the day, and the sun was going down. (It was) a lovely, lovely feeling, and I think that was one of the nicest days. HBO You gave a commencement speech at Vasser in 2002.

One of the things that you said to the students there was, "The world will end if you don't act." Do you have any sort of intention that the audiences should see this film and take some sort of action or should be exhorted to some kind of action from watching the film? Tony Kushner I don't believe that it does that. I really don't. And I don't think you should write a play or make movies with that necessarily in mind. I mean, I wouldn't say you should do it or you shouldn't do it. Maybe some people can do it. In my experience, art doesn't have that affect. I think that when you make art you're doing what you do, when you watch art you're engaged with something dreamlike ...And in fact one of the reasons that we need art and value art is that ... it allows you a confrontation with something that's almost too frightening or too upsetting or too wonderful to encounter in waking life, (and) it gives you a safe environment in which you can encounter it. And the safety of the environment is actually quite specific... that you're robbed of action, sitting in the dark, and you're not expected to do anything.

...Even if they're talking to you, they are talking to you as part of a fiction, they're not talking to you. And you talk about it afterwards, but you remember what you want to remember and you believe what you want to believe and you do what you think you need to do with this information that you've got. But the interpretation, the deciphering of it is up to you.... A real work of art, something with real sophistication and complexity and depth is basically asking all sorts of questions. And then you have to find those answers for yourself. If you think the questions are valuable. If they have answers...some questions don't. What I'd like to believe is that this country is engaged in a great debate. It's always been engaged, and that's what democracy is, really. Different people floating propositions about the meaning and the comforts of life. And then other people responding to those propositions, saying I agree, I disagree. If I agree, then this is what we should do. If I disagree, I propose this as an alternative. I believe that art can be part of that debate.

What I would hope for, (is) that people will watch it and come away with a sense, if not new questions to ask, then at least a sense that you yourself are not the only one asking these questions. If enough people ask these questions they bothered making a whole movie about them. And then you argue with your friends. I loved it, I hated it, I loved this when it happened, this happened because that happened. That kind of dialogue is what one actually can answer. HBO Do you think the changes over the past ten years culturally and politically will change what people perceive the questions to be in the film? Tony Kushner Yes, the play was written during the Reagan era. It started in 1987-88 when Reagan was still President and it was worked on and developed during the years when the first Bush was President and became a big hit when Clinton was President. And I think part of what made it a hit, in addition to whatever its own intrinsic values are, it became a hit because of extrinsic events. It happened to coincide with the returning and the rejection of Reaganism by the American people when they elected Bill Clinton.

And it was performed everywhere on Earth during the course of the year, and it is now coming out on HBO during what, in my opinion, is this kind of appalling and frightening and profoundly dangerous re-occurrence of Reaganism in the form of the second Bush administration. ...It was written long before 9/11 happened. But it is a play with an apocalyptic sensibility. We're still very much children of the millennium. We're a millennial generation. This play, I think... (has) something to say about that. Related media Tony Kushner | Playscripts, Inc. Playscripts, Inc.

Playwright & Screenwriter Biography 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 Mr.

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. Mr. 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 Brundibar by Hans Krasa. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols' film of Angels In America, and Steven Spielberg's films Munich and Lincoln. 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. His latest work includes a collection of one-act plays, entitled Tiny Kushner - featuring characters such as Laura Bush, Nixon's analyst, the queen of Albania and a number of tax evaders - and The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism & Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures (which premiered at the Guthrie Theatre in May 2009 and opened in New York in 2011).

During the 2010-2011 season, a revival of Angels in America ran off-Broadway at the Signature Theater in New York, winning the Lucille Lortel Award in 2011 for Outstanding Revivial. Mr. Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an Emmy Award, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, two Oscar nominations, 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. 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 was also awarded the 2009 Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for lifetime achievement. He is the subject of a documentary film, Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner, made by the Oscar-winning filmmaker Freida Lee Mock. He lives in Manhattan with his husband, Mark Harris.

Tony Kushner’s ‘Angels in America’ is the play I needed after Orlando - The Washington Post Tony Kushner’s ‘Angels in America’ is the play I needed after Orlando The inside track on Washington politics. Be the first to know about new stories from PowerPost. Sign up to follow, and we’ll e-mail you free updates as they’re published. You’ll receive free e-mail news updates each time a new story is published. You’re all set! By Alyssa Rosenberg June 17 Follow @AlyssaRosenberg Christian Natal, left, and Cristian Michaels, right, embrace in front of an Orlando memorial for those who perished in Sunday’s mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub. (Amanda Voisard) For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been recommending pop culture that’s ephemeral and fun and will help take your minds off the worst parts of the ongoing presidential election. But sometimes the things we need to get through difficulty and tragedy aren’t ephemeral or light: Nancy Meyers’s gorgeous kitchens and Hawaiian waves are nice distractions, but they don’t quite rise to the level of balm for the soul.

And balm, rather than distraction, is what matters after the killings of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. The conversation about the shooting wasn’t going to provide it. Watching politicians and pundits try to reduce the murderer’s motivations to whatever might be more convenient for them was simply too depressing to bear. Instead, I found myself reaching back to Tony Kushner’s 1993 play “ Angels in America ” to try to make sense of the mass deaths of queer people. “Angels of America” is set in the 1980s and follows its characters, who range from a fictionalized vision of Joe McCarthy’s mentor Roy Cohn to Louis Ironson and Prior Walter, a gay couple who break up when Prior learns that he is HIV-positive, through the early years of the AIDS crisis. The two-part play is, as its subtitle suggests, “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes”:It involves everything from the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg helping steal Roy’s secret stash of AZT, then an experimental drug, to the appearance of an angel who connects Prior to his lineage via sexual communion.

“Angels in America” is set at a moment when the conditions for queer people in the United States were, in some respects, radically different than they are now. Two of the play’s characters, Roy and Joe, his Mormon protege, are deeply closeted, in part because they believe it would be impossible to be out and working as conservatives. An HIV diagnosis was a virtual death sentence and often carried enormous social stigma. But the murders at Pulse are a reminder that the national right to marry, photographs of Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair and Laverne Cox’s starring role on “ Orange Is the New Black ” are the early miles in the marathon that is the fight for LGBT equality, rather than the finish line. There is still no national law that prevents employers from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, and poverty and unemployment rates are higher in LGBT community than they are in the population at large . Transgender people face risks of serious violence, including murder . Public health researchers have found that anti-queer stigma has an actual impact on life expectancy .

The disconnect between those material realities and symbols of acceptance, from rising LGBT visibility in the media to the presence of Prince William on the cover of the British gay magazine Attitude is disorienting and dispiriting. Returning to “Angels In America” after the killings in Orlando gave me a yardstick for how far queer people in the United States have come since 1993, and a call for the resilience it will take to finish this long and punishing race. “The fountain’s not flowing now, they turn it off in the winter, ice in the pipes,” Prior tells the audience, sitting at the Bethesda Fountain in New York City’s Central Park. “But in the summer it’s a sight to see. I want to be around to see it. I plan to be. I hope to be. This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life.

The Great Work Begins.” There is no consolation for the fact that the victims of the massacre at Pulse are dead. But in death, they have been named and claimed with love , and their families are receiving support . Their deaths have not been marked by the sort of secrecy that led gay men’s families to obscure their causes of death in obituaries after they died of AIDS-related complications. They did not disappear, like some of the victims of the UpStairs Lounge arson in New Orleans in 1973, who were never identified. “The authorities had little to go on,” Jerry McLeod wrote in the New Orleans Advocate last year, reporting on the experiences of a family who learned only in 2015 that a relative had died in the fire . “With a name like [Ferris] LeBlanc, they may have assumed that he was a local and that the family was ashamed to claim the body.” It’s obscene and exhausting that it takes public, violent deaths to win the changes that will allow people to live peaceful, private lives. In 1998, Kushner wrote an angry eulogy for Matthew Shepard , arguing that “Democracy is a bloody business, demanding blood sacrifice.

Every advance American democracy has made toward fulfilling the social contract, toward justice and equality and true liberty, every step forward has required offerings of pain and death.” I despair at that. But I cling to the idea that the world only spins forward. opinions Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner ? American Film Foundation PPR DVD $295.00 Educational DVD for Schools and Universities David Ansen (Newsweek) praises Kushner's "humor, ambition, vision and dazzling braininess" and David Courier (Sundance Festival) writes “one of our greatest living playwrights, Pulitzer and Tony Award winner Tony Kushner (Angels in America, Caroline, or Change, Munich) is a consummate artist and indomitable political activist committed to equality and social justice...watching Marcia Gay Harden as Laura Bush in a scene from Kushner’s new play is worth the price of admission...hearing Meryl Streep read a prayer that Kushner wrote asking  no, demanding God to cure AIDS will tear your heart out. ” In the film, Tony Kushner takes us from his childhood home in small-town Louisiana to his development as a writer, politically active gay man, and endlessly quotable globe-trotting force for a more literate and compassionate universe.

Featuring Meryl Streep, Marcia Gay Harden, Tonya Pinkins, Maurice Sendak, George C. Wolfe, Oskar Eustis, Frank Rich and others. “For students, theatergoers, and any engaged citizen, Mock’s Wrestling with Angels, like a new Kushner play, is not to be missed. The film is a bracing reminder of the unique  and essential  ways in which the stage can frame the major social-political questions of a complex era.” Professor James Fisher, 40th Anniversary: Q&A With Tony Kushner on Writing 'Angels in America' -- New York Magazine (Photo: Getty Images) First things first. Where did the angel come from? I had a dream, in 1985, I believe, when a friend I’d gone to school with was sickï¿½one of the first people I knew who’d gotten the AIDS virus. I had a dream of him in his bedroom with an angel crashing through the ceiling. I wrote a poem called ï¿½Angels in America.ï¿½ I’ve never looked at the poem since the day I wrote it. And how did Mormonism enter into it?

There were these Mormon missionaries that I used to see at my subway stop, in Carroll Gardens, around 1983. One of them was, I thought, kind of hot. They were always there in the morning, in front of a bunch of people who could have cared less about the Book of Mormon. And I was kind of touched by that. So you lived in Carroll Gardens while writing Angels but moved to Manhattan as soon as you could afford it? 537 Clinton Street, right near the BQE. The building was leaning to one side, and there were times I thought it might just fall over. I had been there for about twelve years. I wanted to be in Manhattan. • Back to the New York Canon Main Page Do you miss Brooklyn at all? I loved the neighborhood. I’m working on a new play that’s set in Brooklyn with an Italian-American family. Right after the play opened on Broadway, I was approached at the F-train station by somebody who had heard that Roy Cohn was a character, and he wanted to know if his grandfather was in the play.

I said, ï¿½Who’s your grandfather?ï¿½ He said, ï¿½Carlo Gambino.ï¿½ And I said, ï¿½No, he’s not in the play.ï¿½ And he said, ï¿½I’m really glad to hear that.ï¿½ Then he told me stories about Roy Cohn getting him and his cousin into Studio 54. And the next day, I had a box of very nice Italian red wine sitting outside my front door. You made Heaven look like San Francisco. So why was the play set in New York? Who is it, Baudrillard? One of those French guys said New York is the city of the Apocalypse. It has a kind of real and unreal feeling. It’s also a city of towers, it points upward, so obviously it has this feeling of vision, of a hallucination almost. After the first part, Millennium Approaches, won the Pulitzer and the Tony, you had a very hard time revising part two, Perestroika, in time for the next season. It was horrible.

I gained another twenty poundsï¿½I think I was about 250 or 260 at that point. Every day, when I sat down to writeï¿½I’m not kiddingï¿½a box of Entenmann’s chocolate-chip cookies and a gallon of Coke. I wasn’t on any antidepressants, so that was my drug. I would get one or two scenes written and basically black out from sugar. They had to delay the opening. What happened? I had a fantasy that I could make Perestroika into what the first part isï¿½a pretty tightly constructed entertainment. And [Perestroika] never should have been that; it always should have been its big messy self. There was a real fear that Perestroika would be the undoing of Millennium. You must have driven everyone nuts. Do you feel bad about that? I feel bad about everything. But it’s the way that I write, and something usually emerges that I don’t know I would have gotten [otherwise]. And did you get something out of it?

When we started rehearsals for the first draft, I hadn’t written what I think may be the best scene in the playï¿½we call it the ï¿½Negro Nightmareï¿½ scene, between Belize [the nurse] and Roy Cohn. I’d remembered a dream I had after my grandfather died. He was angry at me about being gay, and then this black man showed up and said, ï¿½I am the Black Other.ï¿½ So I wrote it after we started rehearsals, and I brought it in to [director George C. Wolfe] and said, ï¿½I don’t know, it’s pretty weird.ï¿½ And we read it and George said, ï¿½You’re not touching a word of that.ï¿½ Why do you think Angels got such a huge reaction? I got really lucky. One of the things that was unique about the play was that it was so openly and explicitly political, that the jokes were specifically about Ronald Reagan. There was a sense that you shouldn’t write about specifics, because that will date very quickly. But I couldn’t figure out a way to have modern American people talk about politics without being specific.

Also, it was the end of the Reagan eraï¿½we thoughtï¿½and the beginning of the Clinton era. That combination of rage and grief and optimism is a combination that the play reflects pretty effectively.

Question: Tony Kushner wrote the award-winning play "Angels in...?
Answer: America