SOURCE: Fisher, James. “Introduction: The Feathers and the Mirrors and the Smoke.” In The Theater of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope, pp. 1-20. New York: Routledge, 2002.

[In the following essay, Fisher explains the significance of Kushner's work to American theater of the late twentieth century and turn of the millennium.]

Art is necessary in order that man should be able to recognize and challenge the world. But art is also necessary by virtue of the magic inherent in it.

—Ernst Fischer (14)

Tony Kushner's sudden and conspicuous arrival on the international stage in the early 1990s was as surprising and jolting as the abrupt celestial appearance at the end of Millennium Approaches, the first of Kushner's two Angels in America plays. Together, these plays comprise a theatrical epic that critics compared favorably to the greatest plays of the twentieth century. In an era of increasing devaluation of the arts—and of the theater in particular—Kushner's self-described “gay fantasia on national themes” moved international audiences, generated controversy, and inspired activists and artists.

Kushner's apparently sudden prominence was not so sudden. He was established in regional theaters as a director, adaptor, and dramatist throughout the United States and England since the mid-1980s. Angels represented a remarkable culmination for a playwright laboring to develop a way of presenting political drama on American stages in the late twentieth century. Kushner writes that “since it's true that everything is political (though not exclusively so) it becomes meaningless to talk about political and nonpolitical theatre, and more useful to speak of a theatre that presents the world as it is, an interwoven web of the public and the private” (“Notes about Political Theatre” 22). Imagining a political theater is difficult, Kushner believes, because the theater is “a world that's many things but has always been tainted, tawdry, and superfluous. It's very important not to devalue the tainted, the tawdry, and the superfluous and indeed, the essential tackiness and falseness of the theatre is its greatest aesthetic asset and political strength” (“Notes about Political Theatre” 25). The theater, he believes, presents the sole realm in contemporary life where it is possible to explore the fact

that things are not always what they seem to be; that the unpredictability and vibrancy of actual human presence contains an inimitable power and a subversive potential; that there is an impurity, a fluidity at the core of existence—these secrets speak to the liberationist, revolutionary agenda of our day. I continue to believe in this usefulness, and the effectiveness, of this increasingly marginalized profession and art. But I believe that for theatre, as for anything in life, its hope for survival rests in its ability to take a reading of the times, and change.

(“Notes about Political Theatre” 34)

Angels in America examined these intangible but essential aspects of existence and, as a result, emerged as that rarest of theatrical ventures—a must-see event capturing many of the central issues of its time. It introduced a bold new theatricality to the American stage, as well as demonstrating a bracing intellectualism, lyricism, seriousness (tempered with the outrageously hilarious), and political activism. The tensions between popular mainstream theater and a drama of high purpose (a division that Kushner calls “invidious” [Vorlicky 64]) blends together in Angels, as well as in the rest of Kushner's dramatic work, in unique ways, and he recognizes the importance of the blending of art and the wonderment of the stage:

The theater always has to function as popular entertainment. Or at least the theater that I do, because I don't have the talent for doing anything else, I think … it has to have the jokes and it has to have the feathers and the mirrors and the smoke.

(Vorlicky 63)

The feathers and the mirrors and the smoke, as well as the dynamic seriousness of Angels, thrust Kushner into the theatrical forefront, inviting comparison with earlier titans of American drama from Eugene O'Neill, Clifford Odets, and Thornton Wilder to Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, while also making him a highly visible political and social activist both within the theater and outside its usual borders.

Comprised of two long plays, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, Angels encompasses a complex and emotionally charged portrait of life in the United States in the midst of Ronald Reagan's presidency. Kushner presents this America as a place where present, past, and future intersect in a blur of reality, fantasy, and guardedly hopeful imagination. Written by Kushner during a time in which he despaired about America's sharp swing to the political right and its homophobic response to the mounting devastations of the AIDS crisis, Angels presents the mid-1980s as a critical transitional period in the history of the nation in which complicated questions about the future of American society are raised.

In Angels, as in most of his other plays, Kushner raises hard questions about morality in a diverse nation increasingly conflicted over moral, political, sexual, and spiritual views and values. Can we reckon with the past and constructively embrace the inevitability of change as we move into the future? Is America rushing headlong toward apocalypse or, despite failures and betrayals of its ideals, is it bound for a bright tomorrow? Kushner asks these questions through what has become his trademark mix of the hilarious and the tragic; his view is frequently dark, even frightening, but there is always a redeeming—and hard won—sense of hope. He is a cautious and questioning optimist, aware that there are no easy answers or completely happy endings, but always noting the possibility for change and progress. Examining individuals at moments of significant personal crisis (influenced, to a great extent, by societal conditions and the specters of the past and the future), Kushner probes the national conscience in ways that not only show him to be the equal of his dramatic predecessors and peers on the American stage, but also demonstrate his singularity in creating profoundly emotional and intellectually charged encounters with history, politics, and the personal.

In Angels—and in Kushner's lesser-known but equally challenging dramas—disparate, frequently self-contradictory characters are caught up in tragic personal situations that coincide with periods of significant social change. Their self-contradictions and the conflicts among the characters who, in Kushner's plays, always represent a mixed bag of classes, races, cultural backgrounds, and ideological principles, are explored in the plays. Kushner closely examines the contrasts and parallels between the characters and vividly establishes issues to debate on both the personal and universal levels. Like George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht, Kushner uses the stage as a platform for social, political, and religious argument, but in ways that neither Shaw nor Brecht, nor any other American dramatist, has. In Kushner's plays ideological debate emerges from a composite of rhetorical rationality, literary and cultural imagery drawn from the dogmas of the past, and wildly imaginative fantasy to unfold the complex cross-currents of history. Of history, Kushner acknowledges having “a kind of dangerously romantic reading of American history. I do think there is an advantage to not being burdened by history the way Europe is. This country has been, in a way, an improvisation of hastily assembled groups that certainly have never been together before and certainly have a lot of trouble being together” (Szentgyorgyi 19). It is, he believes, a “mongrel” nation made up of “the garbage, the human garbage that capitalism created: the prisoners and criminals and religiously persecuted and the oppressed and the slaves that were generated by the ravages of early capital” (Szentgyorgyi 19). Within the tensions inherent in these relationships, Kushner finds the pressure points of his drama:

There are moments in history when the fabric of everyday life unravels, and there is this unstable dynamism that allows for incredible social change in short periods of time. People and the world they're living in can be utterly transformed, either for the good or for the bad, or some mixture of the two. I think that Russia in 1917 was one of the times, Chile under Allende was one of those times. It's a moment when the ground and the sky sort of split apart, and there's a space, a revolutionary space. During these sorts of periods all sorts of people—even people who are passive under the pressure of everyday life in capitalist society—are touched by the spirit of revolution and behave in extraordinary ways.

(Szentgyorgyi 16)

Kushner found such a moment for Angels in the rise of the “new conservatism” of the late twentieth century. Kushner seeks out similar historical moments in all of his plays, finding them in the premodern rise of capitalism in the late seventeenth century in Hydriotaphia, or The Death of Dr. Browne, in the collision of the old world shtetls of Eastern Europe and the new technologies of the modern world in his adaptation of the Yiddish theater classic A Dybbuk, in the Nazi Party's seizure of power in 1930s Germany in A Bright Room Called Day, in the American Deep South of the 1960s in Caroline, or Change, in the collapse of the Soviet Union in Slavs!, and in the struggles for survival in the decaying American infrastructures of the late twentieth century in Grim(m).

Kushner's seemingly inexhaustible imagination, informed and fueled by a breathtakingly wide range of literary, cultural, historical, and religious sources, establishes his uniqueness within the traditions of U.S. drama. He is perhaps more successful than any of his predecessors or contemporaries in melding together an aesthetic drawn from aspects of postnaturalistic European theater, with elements of the traditions of America's lyrical dramatic realism. Influences from literature, art, and thought of the ancient world on through to the Renaissance blend together in Kushner's work, along with socialist politics inspired by Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky. In literary and dramatic terms, these political influences derive from Kushner's reading of Walter Benjamin and Brecht, his most important dramatic inspiration. Kushner's study of the great religions, from Christianity and Judaism (his own faith) to a variety of eastern religions, mingles with his love of a broad range of modern and postmodern literary influences including writers from the classical realm to nineteenth-century German classicism: poets ranging from Rilke to Stanley Kunitz; French Renaissance to Yiddish theater; modern dramatists from Brecht, O'Neill, and Williams to such contemporaries as John Guare, Richard Foreman, Maria Irene Fornes, Charles Ludlam, Robert Patrick, Harvey Fierstein, Larry Kramer, Terrence McNally, Suzan-Lori Parks, Paula Vogel, Connie Congdon, Mac Wellman, Ellen McLaughlin, Holly Hughes, David Greenspan, and their British counterparts like Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill, David Edgar, Howard Brenton, and David Hare, among others—all of whom Kushner refers to as part of “a kind of a weird little sort of tarnished golden age” (Vorlicky 210) of late-twentieth-century drama. From Williams to Hare, modern playwrights have attempted to find expressive ways to bring the fantasies and images of the historical past together with the real or imagined earlier lives of their characters, but few have done it with the dramatic potency, humor, and scope Kushner brings to the task.

An understanding of Kushner's political beliefs is essential to fully understanding his drama, as his socialist politics are never far from the surface. Although most critics and audiences think of Kushner almost solely as a “gay dramatist,” it is truly the case that he is a “political dramatist” who happens to be gay. Kushner calls for a new brand of socialism that might better be labeled progressivism, a politics that he has called a “socialism of the skin,” and one that honors the values and traditions of the past without a slavish adherence to belief systems whose traditions have excluded or oppressed diversity in culture, sexual orientation, and politics. For Kushner, socialism is

about beginning to struggle in a really, really powerful way with why economic justice and equality are so incredibly uncomfortable for us, and why we still define our worth by how much money we individually can make at the expense of other people, and why we find sharing and collective enterprise and motivations that are not competitive so phenomenally difficult. It's a tremendously difficult struggle that one has to undertake. It has to do with unlearning privilege; it has to do with examining what sort of events and activities make you feel worthwhile as a human being. But I really believe that the world is doomed unless we can re-create ourselves as social beings as opposed to little ego-anarchists.

(Vorlicky 70)

Kushner insists that unshakable dogmas of any variety are dangerous and that viewing the world solely in rational ways is potentially catastrophic. Rather, he believes it is through the unspoken, the unseen, and a faith in the hard progress built of compassion and humanism that society can proceed most effectively into the unknowable future. Imagination is the true source of revelation for Kushner, particularly an imagination informed by an exposure to the workings of history, and the ways in which history has been understood, distorted, and manipulated over the centuries. Kushner engages with history, reevaluates its evidence and its ruins, its theories and its dictums, and its human toll, with the aim of illuminating those overlooked and misunderstood elements which might offer a valuable lesson for moving forward. Kushner is convinced that

the only politics that can survive an encounter with this world, and still speak convincingly of freedom and justice and democracy, is a politics that can encompass both the harmonics and the dissonance. The frazzle, the rubbed raw, the unresolved, the fragile and the fiery and the dangerous.

(Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness 10-11)

As an American playwright, Kushner's overt political voice makes him a nearly unique figure. Few contemporary dramatists in the United States, whatever their personal politics, examine political issues, theories, and historical figures as Kushner does, although collectives like the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Bread and Puppet Theater offer interesting parallels to Kushner (whose own early experiences as a director and writer were in collective-style theater groups).

Contemporary British writers Caryl Churchill and David Hare attempt, in their different ways, to mount a similar assault on the collisions of history and politics with the personal and, as such, are obvious contemporaries of Kushner, although both British writers work on a smaller dramatic canvas. And despite the fact that there is little similarity in the theatrical styles employed, the work of Nobel Prize-winning playwright and commedia dell'arte-inspired actor Dario Fo is connected to Kushner in that both draw their themes from left-wing politics and both have chosen, in their highly individual ways, to provide a voice for the oppressed and marginalized. Like Fo, Kushner tends toward inclusiveness in both his personal politics and in his art, and this extends even into the ways in which he makes plays. Kushner's plays borrow aspects of expressionism, Brechtian epic theater, realism/naturalism, fantasy, poetic drama, a rich brand of popular culture theatricalism, and a historical, linguistic, and universal thematic scope belonging more to classical and Renaissance dramatic traditions than to much of the theater of the twentieth century.

Much has been written about the importance of Brecht to Kushner's work: Kushner himself has frequently acknowledged the significance of Brecht to his evolution as a writer and theater artist. Reading Brecht's theories and plays “was a kind of revelation to me” (Weber 68), he recalls, and offered the first evidence that led him to believe

that people who are seriously committed political intellectuals could have a home in the theater, the first time I believed that theater, really good theater, had the potential for radical intervention, for effectual analysis. The things that were exciting me about Marx, specifically dialectics, I discovered in Brecht, in a wonderful witty and provocative form. I became very, very excited about doing theater as a result of reading Brecht.

(Weber 68)

As he began to write plays himself in the early 1980s, Kushner was profoundly influenced by Brecht's techniques, as well as the content of his plays. It might reasonably be expected that Kushner would be viewed as a logical heir to those few American dramatists with a political identity (Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller), but Kushner seems instead to descend directly from Ibsen, Shaw, and especially Brecht, believing deeply that “all theater is political” (Blanchard 42).

Kushner's political awakening had begun during his college days after reading Ernst Fischer's The Necessity of Art. A Marxist Approach, as well as the writings of Walter Benjamin, especially Understanding Brecht. From these writings, and from Brecht's plays themselves, Kushner gained a sense of the social responsibility of the artist. However, Kushner's initial response to Fischer was “incredibly angry, because I thought it was Stalinist and dangerous” (Vorlicky 247). Fischer, an Austrian who joined the Communist Party in 1934, was once described by Kenneth Tynan as the Aristotle of Marxism, and in The Necessity of Art he explores not only the nature of art, but the reasons it is needed by society. Fischer seems to be describing the impact of Angels while setting out Kushner's raison d'être when he writes:

In the alienated world in which we live, social reality must be presented in an arresting way, in a new light, through the “alienation” of the subject and the characters. The work of art must grip the audience not through passive identification but through an appeal to reason which demands action and decision.

(Fischer 10)

Fischer points out that even “a great didactic artist like Brecht does not act purely through reason and argument, but also through feeling and suggestion,” with the goal of “enlightening and stimulating action” (Fischer 14). Kushner has obviously drawn on Fischer's concept of art and its purposes, and on Benjamin's conception of history. Kushner explains that his initial anger in response to Fischer's ideas led him to look at other works about art and Marxism, a choice that led him directly to Brecht and Benjamin. Widely regarded as the outstanding German literary critic of the twentieth century, Benjamin was described by Hannah Arendt as “the most peculiar Marxist” of his time, “whose spiritual existence had been formed and informed by Goethe,” but who found in Brecht “a poet of rare intellectual powers and, almost as important for him at the time, someone on the Left who, despite all talk about dialectics, was no more of a dialectical thinker than he was, but whose intelligence was uncommonly close to reality” (Benjamin 11-15). Kushner shares these characteristics with Benjamin, and in Benjamin's essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Kushner finds some grounding for his approach to historical drama. As Benjamin writes:

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.

(256-57)

This brushing against the grain of history is a guiding notion in those instances in which Kushner dramatizes actual events and characters, from the life and death of seventeenth-century writer and physician Sir Thomas Browne in Hydriotaphia to mid-twentieth-century political operative and ultraconservative lawyer Roy Cohn in Angels. It is perhaps too simple to suggest that Kushner's drama provides an alternative history—certainly with Cohn, his depiction seems not to depart very far from the realities of Cohn's life even as he fictionalizes specific events. Instead, Kushner probes into the unexplored corners of the historical figure and situation. He skews the angle of the life to crisis moments (the day of Browne's death or the moment at which Cohn learns that he has AIDS) and from this tilt, fresh visions of the history spill out.

Kushner—who for a time considered a career as a teacher of the literature and history of the Middle Ages—shares Benjamin's belief that history (social, political, and personal) teaches profound lessons and he understands that the concepts of apocalypse and the afterlife are fraught with the same struggles, confusions, and pain encountered in real life. Kushner is inspired by Benjamin's assertion that, as he describes it, one is “constantly looking back at the rubble of history. The most dangerous thing is to become set upon some notion of the future that isn't rooted in the bleakest, most terrifying idea of what's piled up behind you” (Savran 300). While Kushner looks to the past to help frame eternal questions about existence, he does not propose to simply recommit to old values. For Kushner, American society is in an age of intellectual stagnation and profound political and social crisis, but he views the greatest threats as internal—a moral emptiness stemming from what he views as a fundamental abandonment of commitment to justice, compassion, love, and mercy that is a requirement for moral survival in his universe.

There is little doubt that ideas from Benjamin's Understanding Brecht and other essays on art, theater and film, and literature permeate Kushner's work as a dramatist. “Theses on the Philosophy of History” not only provides central imagery for Angels, but it, along with Brecht's writings, illuminates all of Kushner's plays thus far. Kushner has also spoken of feeling intimidated by Brecht's dramatic achievement, that if he could not write a play equal to Mother Courage and Her Children, he did not want to write at all. However, while reading Shakespeare and Brecht at the same time, he found a dialectical method in the structure of the historical plays of these two vastly different dramatists and strove, at the beginning of his playwriting career, to emulate the lyricism and scope of Shakespeare while, at the same time, drawing on the epic qualities of Brecht. Even as a graduate student, Kushner wrote a couple of things that were heavily influenced by Brecht. Seeking an image of a politicized artist who successfully merged art and politics, Kushner found that Brecht offered “a really brilliant marriage of Marxist theory as theater practice” (Vorlicky 248). Brecht, who believed that “if we want a truly popular literature [and here, in regard to Kushner, one might interject theater], alive and fighting, completely gripped by reality and completely gripping reality, then we must keep pace with reality's headlong development” (Brecht 112), seems to imagine a Kushner carrying a Marx-inspired battle against oppression into the future.

Kushner's Brechtian style took fuller shape in his first two important plays, A Bright Room Called Day and Hydriotaphia, and flowered fully in Angels and in his own adaptation of Brecht's The Good Person of Setzuan. Kushner, however, has adapted Brecht's methods to suit his own particular voice, embellishing the method with his own devices. Kushner's major plays adopt a structure that is at once both cinematic (he has said that Robert Altman's 1974 epic film Nashville provided structural ideas for Angels) and Brechtian, but he couples the alienation techniques of Brecht with a fully realized emotional and personal strain drawn more from American lyrical realism than from Brecht (whose character's emotional struggles are often downplayed in his effort to keep the audience focused on the issues). These techniques combine with an often outrageous sense of humor (again, far bolder than the typical dry Brechtian ironies, owing much to Kushner's queering of his subjects), and a phantasmagoric theatricality (extending well beyond anything Brecht contemplated) to offer a completely original brand of American political theater. Much of this originality is already evident in Kushner's earliest plays, but it comes to full fruition between the writing of his first important play, the overtly Brechtian A Bright Room Called Day, and his masterfully original Angels.

As previously noted, the political dramatist is a comparative rarity in the American theater. Kushner's predecessors with political aims, including Odets and Miller, seem to have had little direct influence on Kushner, although he directed a production of Odets's Golden Boy at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis in 1986. The profound influence of European politics, literature, and theater on Kushner is important, but he is, despite this, a quintessentially American figure. The stunning ambition (and length) of Kushner's plays calls to mind Eugene O'Neill, a dramatist whose life and work “excited and impressed” him, and, to a lesser extent, Wilder, but Kushner is closer in spirit to Tennessee Williams, “all-in-all my favorite playwright and probably all-in-all our greatest playwright” (Vorlicky 235).

Kushner also acknowledges some debt to contemporary gay dramatists like Larry Kramer and Harvey Fierstein, but they are less significant to Kushner's development as a dramatist than Williams. There are obvious similarities between Williams and Kushner in the lyricism of both writers and in the sexual identities that inform their work. Perhaps more significantly, Kushner and Williams present views of a changing sociopolitical environment—their characters are generally caught between two worlds: one that is dying and one that is being born. The friction of such transitions—and the attempt to survive in the confusing netherworld created by them—amplifies the emotions and struggles of their characters.

Of his predecessor, Kushner has said, “I've always loved Williams. The first time I read Streetcar, I was annihilated. I read as much Williams as I could get my hands on until the late plays started getting embarrassingly bad. … I'm really influenced by Williams” (Savran 297). Kushner is also drawn to the seriocomic plays of John Guare, who, like Williams, “has figured out a way for Americans to do a kind of stage poetry. He's discovered a lyrical voice that doesn't sound horrendously twee and forced and phony” (Savran 297). Kushner aims for a similar sort of lyricism in Angels, both in language and in theme, weaving a tapestry of the crushing human and spiritual issues of the Reagan era—and beyond—with poignance (in the Williams and Guare senses) and epic stature (in both the differing O'Neillian and Brechtian senses). Kushner's less familiar but no less effective other plays, both full-length and one-act, are similar to Angels in this regard. Williams's passion for illusion, in his appreciation of the fragility of beauty and in the profound heartbreak of his most memorable characters, is certainly evident in Kushner's work. Prior Walter (who gets his name from Walter Benjamin) of Angels is a logical heir to Williams's delicate souls and Kushner, who gives Prior a famous Williams line to repeat in Perestroika, the second of the Angels plays, makes certain that the connection will not be missed—even if Prior turns out, despite his gentleness, to be a survivor, while Williams's Blanche DuBois cannot cope. The influence of Williams on Kushner could hardly be overlooked in the illusory and lyrical aspects of Kushner's work, as critic John Lahr writes:

Not since Williams has a playwright announced his poetic vision with such authority on the Broadway stage. Kushner is the heir apparent to Williams' romantic theatrical heritage: he, too, has tricks in his pocket and things up his sleeve, and he gives the audience “truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.” And, also like Williams, Kushner has forged an original, impressionistic theatrical vocabulary to show us the heart of a new age.

(“Earth Angels” 133)

An important connection between Kushner and Williams also lies in their homosexuality. Williams, who was guardedly open about his sexuality from the 1960s until his death, and featured gay characters in his drama from nearly the beginning of his playwriting career, could not be as “out” as Kushner can be. Still, a gay sensibility fuels the work of both writers. One of the great ironies of the success of Angels (and, for that matter, the plays of Williams) has been the enormous mainstream audience that has embraced it despite the fact that its politics, moral universe, and sexuality are, at least as measured by many of those elected to public office in the United States, incompatible with the beliefs of American society. It is perhaps in this irony that some of the questions that both Williams and Kushner explore meet: “What is the relationship between sexuality and power? Is sexuality merely an expression of power? Is there even such a thing as ‘sexuality’?” (Savran 308).

As is true for Williams, not all—or even most—of Kushner's plays are about homosexuality. Even Angels, a play widely regarded as a milestone in gay drama—and in the movement for gay rights and the war against AIDS—is not simply a gay play. It is about many facets of American life, of which sexuality and homophobia are traditionally, and certainly currently, divisive issues. Gay characters are usually present in Kushner's other plays, but often in secondary roles. However, regardless of the significance of a given character, sexuality informs Kushner's work, much as it does Williams's. If Williams can be said to sexualize American drama, Kushner queers it and the historical events he examines.

Kushner came of age in an era of dizzying changes in the American cultural landscape. Following some abortive efforts to find a “cure” for his sexual orientation, Kushner came to terms with his homosexuality and was inspired by gay activist writers and artists like Williams, and, even more so by those emerging from the Stonewall generation and after. Kushner's identity as a gay man not only led to the dramatic work for which he is most known, but has permeated all of his dramatic work and an increasing commitment to social activism, from a variety of leftist political issues to gay rights and AIDS to the role of controversial art in a society. Kushner was especially inspired by such gay rights organizations as ACT UP and Queer Nation, whose chant “We're here, we're queer, we're fabulous” pervades his drama, especially Angels. The social and political battles of the last four decades of the twentieth century are as important to understanding Kushner as are his literary and theatrical influences.

Kushner's reverence for great dramatic works of the past, many of which examine questions of religious faith in conflict with social reality, the complexities of politics, and the meeting of past and present, is important. As a gay man, Kushner also acknowledges some debt to pioneering gay dramatists Robert Patrick, Kramer, and Fierstein, as well as their logical predecessor, Williams, who dealt more frankly with this topic in later dramas—Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Small Craft Warnings (1972), Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981), and The Notebook of Trigorin (1981). Williams paved the way for other gay dramatists to delve into gender matters with greater purpose, as with the outrageous camp sensibilities of Charles Ludlam and Charles Busch or in the politicized dramas of Kramer—and, ultimately, Kushner's plays. Kushner recognizes that Williams, with lyricism and compassion, brought sexuality out of the American theatrical closet.

Kushner's political activism is of central importance to an understanding of his work. It is also important to appreciate that he is both unmistakably American and strongly connected to his Eastern European roots and its cultural masterworks. As a Jew, Kushner is part of an ethnic heritage that has experienced harrowing losses—and has survived. He identifies parallels between the Jewish experience and what gays have contended with in American society. Kushner struggles with an ambivalence toward Judaism due to homophobic traditions within his faith. However, for him, the connections between Jews and homosexuals are most important in that he believes both groups have a shared a history of “oppression and persecution” that offers “a sort of false possibility of a kind of an assimilation” (Vorlicky 278). Kushner insists that “as Hannah Arendt says, it's better to be a pariah than a parvenu. If you're hated by a social order, don't try and make friends with it. Identify yourself as other, and identify your determining characteristics as those characteristics which make you other and unliked and despised” (Vorlicky 218).

Kushner began his dramatic career in earnest as the terrifying devastation of AIDS became all too clear, and it is against this background that Kushner emerged as a playwright and director. However, to see Kushner solely as a gay dramatist—either in Angels or Kushner's “queering” of history in other works—is far too limiting for a writer whose work is diverse in its subjects and characters. Other influences on him are at least as significant. Some of these can be seen in Angels, but they come into sharper relief in his lesser-known works written and produced both before and after the Angels phenomenon.

There is a sense of classical fatality in Kushner's plays, but there is also an unmistakable Ibsenite element—the idea that humanity may be proceeding on the wrong moral road and that the souls of the past and future will exact retribution. Kushner believes that tragedy—both real and fictional—teaches and changes people, a sentiment he shares with many modern dramatists and, in America, especially with the generation of post-World War II playwrights. American dramatists also supplied Kushner with a strong sense of the personal in drama. In bringing his own autobiography on to the stage, Kushner emphasizes that life is loss: “You can't conquer loss. You lose. To suggest otherwise would be to suggest a fantasy. … Life is about losing. Things are taken from you. People are taken from you. You just have to face it” (Pacheco 17). As a gay man, a Jew, and a political leftist, Kushner strives to express a capacity for forgiveness in the human spirit, but adds that the losses suffered by the groups of which he is a part make a forgiving spirit difficult. As he says, “Loss and forgiveness go hand in hand, and it's tricky” (Vorlicky 63).

If Williams provides Kushner with a powerful model of a dramatist struggling with issues of loss and forgiveness, other American dramatists offer different sorts of inspiration. Miller's plays share the Ibsenite moral quandaries, but Kushner professes not to admire much of Miller's drama except, grudgingly, the raw force of Death of a Salesman, despite his feeling that it is “melodramatic, and it has that awful, fifties kind of Herman Wouk-ish sexual morality that's disgusting and irritating” (Savran 296). However, at least on one level Kushner shares some thematic turf with Miller in questioning America's embracing of commerce—the relentless selling of a product, an image, or an idea as the measure of success—and that, for better or worse, this has been, and will likely continue to be, the driving aspect of the American national persona.

Like Death of a Salesman and its contemporary counterparts in David Mamet's American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, Angels sees the selling of America more in terms of a selling out—of the abandonment of principle, of the loss of compassion for the less fortunate, of a failure to believe in the fundamental connectedness of all members of humanity, despite the vast racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity. Miller and Mamet both focus on the white heterosexual male as the center of society, while Kushner reflects the ever-changing American demographic, expanding it to include the full spectrum of American society. Miller's drama was born out of the crucible of the social struggles of the turbulent 1930s, an era in which America came closest to a socialist society and, as such, an era of significance to Kushner. However, Kushner's own formative era coincided with the turbulent late 1960s and early 1970s. The internalized moral battles of Miller's age, which exploded in the early 1950s during the witch hunts of the House Un-American Activities Committee, surely seem too constricting—even too narrow—for Kushner, an artist inspired to examine diverse issues on a broader and bolder level.

Angels, of course, provided Kushner with numerous awards and a fame usually unavailable to working American dramatists during the last half of the twentieth century. It also made him a leading spokesperson for gay rights and leftist politics in a contentious era for both. Angels, which has elicited both enthusiasm and controversy in productions around the world, is, at the very least, a defiant indictment of the hypocrisy of the American moral compass. Regarding politics, it is ironic that Kushner is perhaps the best-known dramatist of his generation in the United States as the result of representing viewpoints seemingly incompatible with a post-Reagan neoconservative age. Understanding Kushner's dramatic output, his conceptions of stage technique, his views of politics, religion, sexuality, and much else, may offer some insights into not only the drama of the past century, but also into the complex contradictions of American life at the dawn of a new millennium.

Much about Kushner's theatrical achievement, as well as his social and political beliefs, can be found in Angels. However, despite its remarkable impact, Angels is only a part of the rich and impressively diverse dramatic output of a still youthful playwright. The twentieth-century American theater has produced only a few plays equal to Angels: Long Day's Journey into Night, Our Town, A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, A Raisin in the Sun, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It is perhaps too soon to imagine Kushner's ultimate influence on American drama—and society—for at least a couple of reasons. Certainly, there is much more to come from his pen. More significantly, American theater at the dawn of the twenty-first century seems to be moving in several different directions at once. While it is obvious that Kushner provides a boldly epic, highly theatrical, politically engaged, and richly emotive model as a true alternative to the minimalist, densely constructed, and small-scale plays of such other leading contemporary dramatists as Albee, Mamet, McNally, and Sam Shepard, there is little doubt that Kushner has been a revitalizing force in American drama during the last decade of the twentieth century. His influence on the development of the American theater may ultimately equal that of O'Neill or Williams. His drama daringly mixes fantasy and reality—as well as tragedy and comedy—to blend together elements of the past, present, and future of the world of his play, the lives of his characters, and the society in which he lives.

The Theater of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope is the first study to examine Kushner's entire dramatic output thus far. The phenomenon of Angels, while catapulting Kushner to prominence, has, at times, somewhat obscured the rest of his work as a dramatist (in both the full-length and one-act forms), adaptor, screenwriter, and librettist. His plays, produced and unproduced, offer a more staggering range of themes and characters than even the titanic Angels can encompass. In his own plays and his free adaptations, Kushner examines the nature of love as understood through the prisms of diverse cultures from seventeenth-century France to the shtetls of Eastern Europe, the rise of capitalism at the dawn of the industrial age, issues of spirituality and religion, the moral dilemmas of the Holocaust, the collapse of the Soviet Union, environmental catastrophe, psychoanalysis, grassroots tax revolt, the experience of immigrants coming to the United States, the struggles of gays within a homophobic society, the nature of art, and the meanings of death and the afterlife.

This book will examine all of these plays in an attempt to shed some light on the techniques and themes of Kushner's work and his place in millennial American and international drama. In exploring the profound moral, social, religious, and political questions that will shape the future of the United States in the world community, Kushner's ambitious output extends well beyond the impressive Angels. Single chapters are devoted to each of his produced full-length plays (A Bright Room Called Day, Hydriotaphia, or The Death of Dr. Browne,Angels in America, and Slavs! Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness). Other chapters will examine a number of his one-act plays and his numerous adaptations including The Illusion (from Pierre Corneille's L'Illusion comique), Stella (from Goethe's play), St. Cecilia, or The Power of Music (adapted from a story by Heinrich von Kleist), A Dybbuk (from S. Ansky's Yiddish theater classic, The Dybbuk), Brecht's The Good Person of Setzuan, and Widows, adapted in collaboration with Chilean novelist and political activist Ariel Dorfman. Kushner has also completed a number of unpublished and/or unproduced works that will be examined in this study, including the opera libretto Caroline, or Change, the screenplay Grim(m), and a number of works-in-progress, including a three-play cycle on economic history, the first play of which, Henry Box Brown, or The Mirror of Slavery, is expected to debut at the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain. Attention will also be paid to Kushner's essays, poetry, and political activism.

The Theater of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope draws its subtitle from part of a speech spoken by Prior Walter in Perestroika, the second of the Angels plays: “We live past hope” (136). This line, more than any other in Kushner's oeuvre, captures the intent of his drama: a belief that despite centuries of historical and personal tragedy, we must progressively face the inevitabilities of a future we cannot know while, at the same time, learning from an often tragic and destructive past we know only too well. Belief in progress, in compassion, in the transformative power of love, in true community is the religion Kushner offers for the new millennium.

THE GREAT WORK BEGINS: A SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Tony Kushner is drunk on ideas, on language, on the possibility of changing the world. His talent and his heart are incendiary, combustible, explosive, heartbreakingly vital and on-target.

—Larry Kramer (Roca 32)

Tony Kushner was born in New York City on July 16, 1956, the second of three children of William and Sylvia (Deutscher) Kushner, both classically trained musicians who encouraged their son's interests in art and literature (they even named him after popular singer Tony Bennett as an added encouragement). From his parents, “New York-New Deal liberals transplanted to the Deep South,” he inherited “a healthy appetite for politics, for history, for political theory,” a hunger they, in turn, inherited from their parents, “all of us indebted to the insatiable curiosity, skepticism, pessimistic optimism, ethical engagement, and ardent pursuit of the millennium that is, for me, the most valuable heritage of nearly two thousand years of Diasporan Judaic culture” (“Notes about Political Theatre” 20).

Kushner spent most of his childhood in Lake Charles, Louisiana (“No one asked me if I wanted to go,” Kushner jokes [Szentgyorgyi 18]), where his mother, a professional bassoonist, “one of the first American women to hold a principal chair in a major orchestra (the New York City Opera orchestra at the age of eighteen)” (“Notes about Political Theatre” 19), and an amateur actress, frequently performed in local plays, including Death of a Salesman, The Diary of Anne Frank, and A Far Country. It was in Louisiana, in “the culture of ‘genteel’ post-integration bayou-county racism” (Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness 50), that Kushner became entranced by the emotional power of the theater and the arts in general—he would return to this setting for a semiautobiographical libretto, Caroline, or Change, and other of his works include similarly autobiographical strains most touchingly demonstrated in the sad bassoon music he employs in some in honor of his mother's memory. The stage, a place of “hysterical and historical conversion” (“Notes About Political Theatre” 20), provided an appealing world for a child who knew, even at an early age, that he was different: “I grew up very, very closeted, and I'm sure that the disguise of theater, the doubleness, and all that slightly tawdry stuff interested me” (Savran 293). As a child, he also acted occasionally in plays himself, but resisted the off-stage gay life of the theater which frightened him, becoming instead a high school debater because, “I had decided at a very early age that I would become heterosexual” (Savran 293). This painful struggle with his true self continued into Kushner's twenties.

Kushner moved to New York in 1974 to begin his college education at Columbia University, where he completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature in 1978. During his time at Columbia, he immersed himself in the New York theater scene, taking in as many Broadway shows as possible, as well as more experimental works by Spalding Gray, Lee Breuer, JoAnne Akalaitis, and especially Richard Schechner's production of Mother Courage and Her Children (“which I still think is the greatest play ever written”) and Richard Foreman's staging of The Threepenny Opera (“which I saw about ninety-five times and which is one of my great theater experiences” [Savran 294]). Kushner's taste in theater began to mature, as did his “fairly standard liberal politics” (Savran 294) influenced by faculty and fellow students at Columbia, but more importantly through his growing interest in Brecht. He read Brecht's dramatic works, as well as his seminal essay, “A Short Organum for the Theater,” along with Marx, Arnold Hauser, and Benjamin's Understanding Brecht. He was also drawn into study of medieval literature, including Beowulf, finding the “magic and the darkness of it very appealing” to his “fantastical, spiritual side” (Savran 295). His study of the classics included the Greeks and he found himself moved to realize that ancient plays by Aeschylus or Euripides did not seem at all primitive. Although he claims not to believe in fundamental universal truths, he discovered in reading ancient and medieval works that “there are certain human concerns” (Savran 295) that have always been part of the human experience.

In this period, Kushner grappled intensely with his sexual orientation, seeking therapy to find a so-called cure for his homosexuality, before facing it in various ways. One involved calling his mother from a New York City phone booth in September 1981 to tell her that he was gay, a scene he would powerfully recreate in Angels. In experiences recognized by many homosexuals, Kushner found himself struggling with his father's initial disapproval, though their battles eventually subsided as the senior Kushner accepted his son's orientation. Kushner himself came to embrace his sexuality and, as a dramatist, especially in the wake of Angels, became a prominent activist in the movement for gay and lesbian rights.

Following the completion of his degree at Columbia, Kushner worked as a switchboard operator at the United Nations Plaza Hotel beginning in 1979. During this period, he also directed small-scale theater productions of very big plays, ranging from stagings of Shakespeare's The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream to Brecht's The Baden-Baden Play for Learning. Accepted to New York University's Tisch School of the Arts to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree in directing, Kushner staged a short Brecht play as his audition for entrance into the program. At Tisch, he was trained under the guidance of Brecht specialist Carl Weber and aspired to follow the paths of such forerunning theatrical artists as Richard Foreman, Joanne Akalaitis, and Liz LeCompte, whose productions he found exceptional.

Kushner continued to work the switchboard to pay the rent, but in the summers he also worked at a school for gifted children in Louisiana, writing plays for them to perform and others which he produced with his fellow students at Tisch prior to completing his degree in directing in 1984. Some of these plays were also staged by the Imaginary Theatre Company at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis and elsewhere. Kushner's plays from this period, beginning around 1982, demonstrate the breadth and virtuosity of his later playwriting, including a range of genres and styles, including an opera (La Fin de la Baleine: An Opera for the Apocalypse [1982]), some childrens' theater plays (Historiomax [1985], Yes Yes No No [1985], The Protozoa Review [1985], The Heavenly Theatre: Hymns for Martyred Actors [1985], In Great Eliza's Golden Time [1986]), one-act and full-length plays (The Age of Assassins [1986], Last Gasp at the Cataract [1986], and Hydriotaphia, or The Death of Dr. Browne [1987]), and an adaptation (Goethe's Stella [1987]). They also demonstrate elements of his later works in their lyricism, thematic sweep, and bold theatricality. For example, one of his earliest works, the 1982 La Fin de la Baleine: An Opera for the Apocalypse (translated from the French, the title means The End of the Whale), a theater-dance piece, features a scene in which a woman with a tuba dances on point while spouting water from her mouth. Imagination, ambition, and political commitment were Kushner's most evident traits as a beginning dramatist.

GRIEF PUSHES OUTWARD: YES YES NO NO

It might be argued that, perhaps,
Civilization would collapse
Without us feeling that we had
Collectively done something bad.

—Actor 1, Yes Yes No No (5.19)

An especially illuminating example of Kushner's early works is his children's play, Yes Yes No No (subtitled The Solace of Solstice Apogee/Perigee Bestial/Celestial Holiday Show), which demonstrates that even within the often debased form of children's theater, and even at the beginning of his work as a dramatist, Kushner's imaginative poetic gifts and thematic ambition are present and, to a great extent, fully formed. Directed and designed by Kushner for the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis's Imaginary Theatre Company, and performed in shopping malls and hospitals from December 2-21, 1985 (with a brief December 23-27, 1985 run on the Rep's main stage), Yes Yes No No features a cast of four women, played in the original production by Kari Eli, Maggie Lerian, Lisa Raziq, and Jeanne Trevor. The roles can also be played by an all-male cast merely by changing a few pronouns in the text, but in either case cast members each play numerous roles.

Set during the winter solstice (at “various places around the universe” [stage directions]), Yes Yes No No announces that it is no ordinary children's play as its prologue establishes a seriocomic tone, an actor-centered technique, and explores themes no less significant than the creation of the universe and the meaning of good and evil. Beginning with a typically Kushnerian question, a tape-recorded voice (God?) asks, “Is it not wonder?” (Prologue. 1), as actors, playing shepherds and angels, ruminate on the beauty of the winter environment and remark that they are looking on

The Face
Of God, the Face
Of Heaven, miracle face
Of angels announcing in a language of Awe
To a cold frightened hilltop
Open vowels of …

(Prologue. 1)

At which point they are interrupted by a chorus of sheep “ooh-ooh”-ing “The First Noel.” This abrupt mixture of the portentous and the comic is a Kushner trademark that, along with his characteristically poetic language, is in ample evidence in this imaginative trip through religious myth and science. In the play's first part, God and Space converse about the creation of the first atom, and God has an idea:

It will be VERY small.
It will be VERY light.
It will be HARD TO SEE
And HARD TO TOUCH.
It will not be much but
It will be Something.

(1.4)

Space thanks God for the atom's creation, noting that

This could be the start
Of Something b-b-b-
Big.

(1.5)

In part 2, the actors reflect on the multiplication of atoms and gases fusing to create the universe, with Kushner implanting a little political theory, as when all four actors proclaim

From grains of sand to giant stars all things share one condition. The world we see would never be except for OPPOSITION.

(2.8)

The complications of the making of the universe—and the existence of the human lives created (“Life is confusing” [3.8])—reveal, to some extent, Kushner's own childhood confusions and struggles, as in some counterpoint speeches in part 3:

Sometimes, when I am
sad, I can't remember what
it's like to be happy, and I
think I'll never be happy
again.

(3.9)

Sometimes when I am
happy, I can't remember what
it's like to be sad, and I
think I'll never be sad again.

(3.10)

Part 4 explores the “contrariness” inherent in existence, as the angels, who are “very very nice,” share a feast at the Table of Elements with the devils, who “live in Hell” (4.13). When a devil and an angel get into a fight, the angel's wings are broken off. God intervenes with a way of reinventing this damaged angelic being:

I
Have an idea.
I will name it
Something new.
I will call it
Human.

(4.14-15)

The devil, feeling guilty, wants to know how he might atone for his sin, but begs the Human not to take his “badness” which “is all I have” (4.15), so the Human instead takes his guilt:

While the angel, who was now
A human being, was left
Feeling guilty,
And so became more human
Than before.

(4.16)

In part 5, Kushner examines the nature of guilt and its relation to human affairs (“Even the President feels guilty” [5.17]), which allows his young audience to experience the ways they feel when mistakes and their differences cause disturbance. Responses to guilt, apologizing, praying, talking to an analyst, singing, and eating are tested and found wanting, so Kushner proposes that it is possible that civilization might end without a collective human feeling of guilt. Even Santa Claus, it is revealed, feels guilty sometimes. One of the actors tells a tale in which a group of Santas give up their joyful dancing in the snow because they are too fat. Feeling greatly depressed:

They all ate like little piggies
Faster than they could digest.
Ate the puddings, pears and figgies;
Then they didn't feel depressed!

(5.20)

At least not for the moment, until they are overwhelmed by feelings of despair much worse than what they felt before: “Why won't it ever let me be?” (5.21). Part 6 explores the meaning of despair, as Devil-Tempters play on human guilt, with the result that their souls are “slamming shut” (6.22) and

Grief pushes outward
And down to
A dreamless deep slumber,
Heavy and hollow
And endlessly sad.

(6.22)

For the final scene, the actors play “a BUSH, a PERSON, and two RAVENS” (6.23) crying at the coming of the sad, cold, and lonely winter. Person pricks his finger on a thorn from the Bush, leading all to marvel at the beauty of the “drop of red” (7.25) blood that, they imagine, is like the berries that come with springtime. They all feel better that “winter doesn't last forever” (7.25) and understand, as one of the actors explains in a final speech, that the spring is impossible without the winter:

Because this is a world that depends on FRICTION,
The Yes and the No and the CONTRADICTION.
The seed and the plant and the plant and the seed,
And is it not a wonder
Indeed?

(7.27)

Yes Yes No No was described by Don Shewey, who served on a panel selecting plays for an anthology of children's plays, as “the maddest piece of kid-lit I'd read since Ionesco's story for toddlers in which all the characters are named Jacqueline” (Shewey 32). Certainly few children's plays would attempt to deal, however lightheartedly and lyrically, with the issues in Yes Yes No No. Kushner typically takes his audience—even the young one this play is aimed at—into the depths of despair and pain from which he finds, through a belief in the wonder of existence, the essential spinning forward of progress and a hope earned through suffering and difficulty.

Yes Yes No No and Kushner's other early works explore themes and dramatic techniques that would remain evident, if more masterfully employed, in his plays through the end of the twentieth century. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Kushner's work, both as a director and a playwright, and as the artistic director of the Heat & Light Company, a political theater group, brought him awards and the support of several prestigious grants, including the Seidman Award in Directing from the New York University Tisch School of the Arts in 1983-84, a Directing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1985, the Princess Grace Award in 1986, a Playwriting Fellowship from the New York State Council for the Arts in 1987, and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988.

Kushner became assistant director of the St. Louis Repertory Theatre in 1985-86, and in 1987-88 he became artistic director of the New York Theatre Workshop. For NYTW he staged early versions of A Bright Room Called Day and his Goethe adaptation, Stella, and, that same year, directed the first version of his play, Hydriotaphia, or The Death of Dr. Browne, for the Home for Contemporary Theatre and Art in New York. Kushner also worked as Director of Literary Services for the Theatre Communications Group during 1989 and regularly taught at an array of universities, ultimately joining the permanent faculty of the Tisch School in 1996. However, Kushner's efforts as a director and teacher were superseded by his writing, adapting, and political activism in the late 1980s. Along with his own plays and adaptations, Kushner exercised his writing skills in a variety of ways, including contributing a narration to replace Paul Green's original text of Johnny Johnson to accompany Kurt Weill's music in a concert performance of the piece performed by Larry Kert on a program called Voices of Change. American Music of Protest, Politics and Persuasion in September 1989. This breadth of activity suggests that in all aspects of his work—even from its beginnings—Kushner merged politics, literature, and music, as would be amply evident in all of his dramatic work.

In this period, Kushner lost his mother to cancer and he completed and produced his first important plays. It is at this point that The Theater of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope begins, with the goal of serving as an introduction to Kushner's complete dramatic works to date and placing them beside the extraordinarily acclaimed Angels. Some of these works feature themes Kushner explored in Angels, while others move in different directions, both thematically and dramaturgically. Setting Angels within the context of Kushner's entire output as a working dramatic artist during an era of new energy, broader ethnic and gender diversity, and conspicuous theatricality on American stages will hopefully deepen understanding and appreciation of his dramatic journey to, as critic John Lahr describes it, “that most beautiful, divided, and unexplored country—the human heart” (“Angels on Broadway” 137).

Notes

1. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Essays and Reflections. Edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.

   Blanchard, Bob. “Playwright of Pain and Hope,” Progressive, vol. 58, October 1994, pp. 42-44.

   Fischer, Ernst. The Necessity of Art. A Marxist Approach. Translated by Anna Bostock. New York: Penguin Books, 1963.

   Kushner, Tony. Angels in America. A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Part Two: Perestroika. New York: Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 1992, 1994.

   ———. “Notes about Political Theatre,” Kenyon Review, vol. XIX, nos. 3/4, summer/fall 1997, pp. 19-34.

   ———. Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness, Essays, A Play, Two Poems and A Prayer. New York: Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 1995.

   ———. “Yes Yes No No. The Solace of Solstice Apogee/Perigee Bestial/Celestial Holiday Show,” in Plays in Process. Three Plays for Young Audiences. Vol. 7, no. 11. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1987.

   Lahr, John. “Angels on Broadway,” New Yorker, May 23, 1993, p. 137.

   ———. “Earth Angels,” New Yorker, December 13, 1993, pp. 129-33.

   Pacheco, Patrick. “AIDS, Angels, Activism, and Sex in the Nineties,” Body Positive, September 1993, pp. 17-28.

   Roca, Octavio. “Kushner's Next Stage,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 6, 1998, p. 32.

   Savran, David. “Tony Kushner,” in Speaking on Stage. Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights, edited by Philip C. Kolin and Colby H. Kullman. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996, pp. 291-313.

   Shewey, Don. “Tony Kushner's Sexy Ethics,” Village Voice, April 20, 1993, pp. 29-32, 36.

   Szentgyorgyi, Tom. “Look Back—And Forward—In Anger,” Theater Week, January 14-20, 1991, pp. 15-19.

   Vorlicky, Robert, ed. Tony Kushner in Conversation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998.

   Weber, Carl. “I Always Go Back to Brecht,” Brecht Yearbook/Das Brecht-Jahrbuch, vol. 25, 1995, pp. 67-88.