***** New York Times November 30, 2003 Hurricane Kushner Hits the Heartland By ALEX ABRAMOVICH
With two Tony Awards, a Pulitzer Prize and a stack of once-in-a-lifetime reviews, Tony Kushner admits, "I don't need any earthquakes in my life."
And yet he's heading into the most seismically charged week of his career: his latest work, the semi-autobiographical musical "Caroline, or Change," opens at the Public Theater today; the first half of Mike Nichols's six-hour, star-filled, $60 million adaptation of Mr. Kushner's epic "Angels in America" has its premiere on HBO next Sunday. The cable network, which is also producing an adaptation of Mr. Kushner's play "Homebody/Kabul," is betting heavily that the playwright - who is a socialist, gay and so very Jewish (according to his friend Maurice Sendak) that "it hurts your eyes" - is ready for prime time. "Angels" will be broadcast and rebroadcast to more than 30 million homes, and the number of people who see it the very first night should easily outnumber those who have seen the play in the several hundred North American stage productions since it opened on Broadway 10 years ago.
It is hard to imagine a more frenetic, suspenseful moment, but Mr. Kushner has a coping strategy: he simply adds more commitments. Three weeks ago, he could be found in Nashville, at Vanderbilt University, a campus where Confederate flags hang proudly in dormitory windows. During a question-and-answer session with a few dozen undergraduates, Mr. Kushner asked as many questions as he answered, spent a good 10 minutes discussing set design with an engineering major and had to be dragged away to an appointment with the school's chancellor. Afterward, he gave a public reading of his latest work-in-progress, "Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy," which envisions Laura Bush reading the Grand Inquisitor chapter of "The Brothers Karamazov" to the ghosts of dead Iraqi children.
The reading took place in the university's chapel, before a predominantly middle-aged and elderly audience. What might have been a polarizing performance was greeted with laughter and applause. Later, Mr. Kushner gave thoughtful, lengthy responses to questions about Israel, AIDS and Ralph Nader - every subject, it seemed, except the theater, which no one in the audience thought to ask about. As the crowd filtered out, an elderly man leaned over to his wife and registered his surprise at Mr. Kushner's performance. "Smart Jew!" he said.
MR. KUSHNER is 47, stands 5 feet 11 inches tall and dresses casually in khakis and crewneck sweaters, unless he is appearing before a large audience, when he wears a dark suit and bow tie. In person, he is as intense and impassioned, but less serious and self-satisfied, than his work and string of accolades might lead you to expect. His conversation is quick, emphatic, torrential - it comes in complete paragraphs, which themselves come complete with footnotes, jokes and marginalia. The word "dialectic" puts in frequent appearances, and questions about God are liable to be answered with references to 18th-century astronomers. . . .
Mr. Kushner studied literature at Columbia University and contemplated nursing or law as possible career paths. By his senior year, he had immersed himself in Shakespeare, discovered Bertolt Brecht and settled on the theater. For him, art and politics have always gone hand in hand. "Brecht was like a light bulb going off," he says. "He teaches you that within what is apparently a naturally occurring event lies a web of human labor and relationships. He teaches you to see that something can be the thing it's supposed to be, and not, at the same time. I got Marx, I think, through Brecht, and realized that the theater is astonishing in the way it presents that paradoxical sensation."
Most playwrights set their work in offices or living rooms. Mr. Kushner sets his in time, in moments of historical flux and conflict. His first mature play, "A Bright Room Called Day" (1985), takes place during the rise of the Third Reich. "Slavs!," which was written as a coda to "Angels in America," described the collapse of Communism. And "Homebody/Kabul," which had its New York premiere just months after the attacks on Sept. 11, and played earlier this fall in a revised form at the Mark Taper Forum, depicts the effects of postcolonial civil decay in Britain and Afghanistan. "Henry Box Brown, or the Mirror of Slavery," which is scheduled to have its premiere in 2005, ties the British textile industry to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. . . .
He also moved beyond theater. To date, he has published poems, criticism, personal essays, political investigations, public addresses, opera librettos, song lyrics and a children's book. In the last two months, he has published three books, with three different publishers: While working on "Brundibar," he also wrote the text for "The Art of Maurice Sendak," a book-length essay that Mr. Sendak considers to be the best appreciation of his work. A third collaboration, with his friend the Village Voice writer Alisa Solomon, is an anthology of progressive Jewish-American responses to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, called "Wrestling With Zion." An essay collection, "Save Your Democratic Citizen Soul!" is forthcoming. . . .
While Mr. Kushner sees "Angels" as his "response to the Reagan counterrevolution, which began in response to the great cultural revolution of the 1960's," he is confident that it will resonate with today's audiences. "Reaganism is still alive and kicking, and doing dreadful damage," he says. "The apocalypse the play anticipates in its darker moments is both metaphoric and real. The world is hotter than it was when I wrote the play. It's crazier. The trouble we're in is, if anything, worse."
. . . Mr. Kushner's politics are tied directly to his tragicomic sense of himself as "both a God-believing Jew and a historical materialist socialist humanist agnostic." . . .
. . . Mr. Kushner, who likes to be up and writing by 6 a.m., is so productive that his next challenges might have less to do with finding new projects than choosing among them. Since he is at ease in a number of mediums, his works often jump from one format to the next. One - "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, With a Key to the Scriptures" - started as a novel, morphed into a dramatic monologue, and is currently being rewritten as a full-length play. At the same time, Mr. Kushner is working on his most ambitious project yet - the three-play, seven-hour slave-trade epic "Henry Box Brown." . . .
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/arts/television/30ABRA.html> *****
Tony Kushner's List of Projects: <http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/arts/television/kushner-side3.html>
A Partial List of Tony Kushner's Current Political Preoccupations: <http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/arts/television/kushner-side2.html> -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>