CREDIT: Associated Press/Craig Lassig
IN THE 1990s, playwright Tony Kushner heard newspaper accounts of an oppressive fundamentalist regime that ruled a forgotten country in central Asia. He set his next play, Homebody/Kabul, in Afghanistan. The play mentions someone named Osama bin Laden, whom most Americans had never heard of. The play, which looked at the West’s uneasy relationship with that troubled country, was in rehearsal in September 2001 when the World Trade Center was attacked. Americans would soon hear a great deal about the country, bin Laden, and the conditions Kushner was writing about.
Kushner’s next play was a musical based on his experiences growing up in a Jewish family with an African American maid in Louisiana during the civil rights movement. Caroline, or Change opened in New York in November 2003. In the opening scene, Caroline sings,
Nothing ever happen underground in Louisiana
’Cause they ain’t no underground in Louisiana
There is only underwater.
Less than two years later, Hurricane Katrina burst the levees and New Orleans was flooded.
Kushner’s plays focus on the oppression facing the poor, blacks, Jews, gays, and others. Kushner links his characters’ fates to the conditions of the larger society and challenges his audience to consider the moral responsibilities of people in positions of power.
Kushner gained international acclaim as an unusually gifted, wide-ranging playwright with his Angels in America, which opened on Broadway in 1993. It earned Kushner a Pulitzer Prize and two Tony Awards. The two-part, seven-hour epic play is set during the beginning of the AIDS pandemic, when the disease was still called the “gay plague,” there was no cure in sight, and most government officials refused to acknowledge its existence.
A sweeping denunciation of Reagan-era conservatism, Angels weaves together the stories of six characters, including a gay man who abandons his lover when the lover shows signs of AIDS; a married Republican Mormon lawyer who wrestles with his homosexuality; the real-life Roy Cohn, a ruthless right-wing attorney who worked for Senator Joe McCarthy during the Red Scare and who died of AIDS in 1986 without ever acknowledging his sexual identity; and Ethel Rosenberg, a rank-and-file Communist during the McCarthy era who was prosecuted by Cohn and then executed, along with her husband, Julius Rosenberg, for being a Soviet spy. In 2003 the play was made into an HBO television movie starring Meryl Streep, Al Pacino, and Emma Thompson. It won eleven Emmy Awards.
Angels in America—subtitled A Gay Fantasia on National Themes—is a moral report card on America in the Reagan era and beyond.
“What used to be called liberal is now called radical,” Kushner said in 1995. “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.”
Kushner’s political views have not changed dramatically over the years. His first play, A Bright Room Called Day, written in 1987, depicts the lives of young liberal and radical artists living in Berlin during the rise of Adolf Hitler. Kushner’s left-wing politics have often stirred controversy. But during a career of challenging the status quo, Kushner is rarely doctrinaire. He celebrates the progress made by activists and the give-and-take of politics. “One of the painful rites of passage that everyone on the left goes through is to realize it’s a lifelong struggle,” Kushner once explained in a 1995 interview with Mother Jones magazine. But, he also noted, “I don’t believe you would bother to write a play if you really had no hope.”
Caroline, or Change, which looks at relationships between blacks and whites in Louisiana during the civil rights movement, “illustrates one of the ultimate cases in which American democracy achieved something great,” Kushner told Mother Jones magazine in 2003. “I don’t see how anyone can read that history and then turn their back on the system—how anyone can think it’s not important who our justices are, who the president is, who’s in Congress.”
Having lived through the gay rights revolution, Kushner takes pride in the movement’s accomplishments. “For gay people, the overturning of the sodomy laws is immensely significant. It’s why I think politics is so extraordinary.” Kushner, who married his partner in 2008, is a fervent advocate of marriage equality. Legalizing gay marriage, he told Newsweek in May 2009, would mean that gays were finally “complete citizens of this country.”
The failure of liberals and progressives to rally behind the Broadway stagehands’ 2007 strike inspired Kushner’s play The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, which opened in Minneapolis in 2009 and reached Broadway in 2011. “I thought all of us liberal-shmiberals would be out on the line with them,” he explained to New York magazine in October 2010, but the creative class and the theater-going public turned their backs on Broadway’s blue-collar workers. “It was stunning to me, because isn’t the idea of labor unions that you get working-class people to live in nice houses and send their kids to college?”
The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide tells the story of Gus Marcantonio, a retired longshoreman, labor organizer, and Communist. In the summer of 2007, as the Wall Street meltdown is devastating the economy, he has lost political hope. He gathers his family around him to help him decide whether or not to commit suicide. (One of Gus’s sons is named Vito Marcantonio, after the left-wing congressman from New York in the 1930s and 1940s.)
Like Arthur Miller’s works, Kushner’s plays examine families who live in difficult times and have to make difficult choices. His own family background provides plenty of thorny dilemmas. Kushner was born in New York City to Jewish parents who were both professional classical musicians. His mother was one of the first women to have a major position—first bassoonist—in a major symphony orchestra. She had recorded with Igor Stravinsky and had played at the first Pablo Casals Festival. His father was a Julliard-trained clarinetist. When Tony was born, they were both playing for the New York City Opera.
Soon after Kushner was born in 1956, the family moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana, the small town where his father grew up. Kushner’s father initially worked in his family’s lumber business and conducted the local symphony. Kushner’s mother had her own frustrations—a New Yorker living in a small southern town, her music career behind her, carrying the primary responsibility for raising the children, including their difficult-to-handle daughter, who was born with a severe hearing loss. Yet it was seeing his mother on stage in amateur productions that started Kushner’s lifelong fascination with theater, especially when she transformed herself into the elderly Linda Loman in Miller’s Death of a Salesman. “It was terrifying and wonderful. I don’t think I ever saw her the same way again,” Kushner told an interviewer for the New Yorker in January 2005.
Teased by other boys as a youngster, Kushner escaped into books. But he found his voice in high school, becoming a champion—and merciless—member of the debate team. He was also a rebel, refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, supporting feminism, even passing out leaflets for liberal George McGovern to Ku Klux Klan members. Tony had recognized since childhood that he was attracted to males—and that it was forbidden. In 1974 he headed back to New York to attend Columbia University, where he took a playwriting course and was a drama critic for the Columbia Spectator. He waited until he was twenty-five to tell his parents he was gay.
After Columbia, he earned a master’s degree at New York University. A New York Times critic in May 2011 said Kushner is “perhaps the most intellectually far-reaching of all major mainstream American playwrights.” All three major components of Kushner’s identity—a Jew, a gay man, and a socialist—figure in his work. “It’s much easier to talk about being gay than it is to talk about being a socialist,” Kushner told Mother Jones in 1995.
Kushner’s screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s film Munich (for which he won an Oscar) triggered another controversy by questioning the morality of Israel’s war on terrorism. The film first invites the audience to identify with the horror of the murder of eleven Israeli athletes by Arab terrorists during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. Most writers would portray the Israeli government’s attempt to avenge those murders—by hiring assassins to find and kill the terrorists—as a legitimate form of eye-for-an-eye justice. But Kushner questioned the extralegal tactics of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, in hunting down and killing Arabs thought to be linked to the Munich massacre.
Kushner was criticized for condoning Arab terrorism. In response, Kushner explained to Moment magazine in 2007, “You can deplore someone’s behavior without denying that the person is human and is motivated by recognizable and possibly even empathizable motives.”
Kushner has been both a strong supporter of Israel’s right to exist and a strong critic of its treatment of Palestinians. He has received many honors from Jewish organizations. But in May 2011 controversy erupted when the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice rescinded its offer of an honorary degree after a prominent trustee, who had been appointed by former governor George E. Pataki, attacked Kushner for being anti-Israel. In a letter to the board, Kushner defended his views on Israel, accused his critics of slander, and demanded an apology. Several previous honorees, including writer Barbara Ehrenreich, said they would return their degrees if Kushner was denied his honor. The outcry on Kushner’s behalf forced the university to backpedal and, within days, to reverse its decision.
In his remarks to the graduates upon receiving the degree, Kushner praised those who had organized on his behalf. “Behind [these efforts] there stands a shining community of people, of spirits of whom I’m proud to be able to call myself kindred,” Kushner said, “who believe in the necessity of honest exchanges of ideas and opinions, who understand that life is a struggle to synthesize, to find a balance between responsibility and freedom, strategy and truth, survival and ethical humanity.”
“There’s injustice everywhere,” he continued. “There’s artificial scarcity everywhere. There’s desperate human need, poverty and untreated illness and exploitation everywhere. Everywhere in the world is in need of repair, so fix it. Solve these things.”