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P42-52 Lahr Kushner Well.L.Ps

P42-52 Lahr Kushner Well.L.Ps

PROFILES AFTER ANGELS

Tony Kushner’s Promethean itch.

BY JOHN LAHR

n May 2, 2004, the humid Sun- cember, HBO aired ’s sixty- breath and figure out how we’re going to Oday that his musical “Caroline, or million-dollar film version, for which give this a respectable run on Broadway.” Change” was to transfer from the Pub- Kushner adapted the play and which Kushner admits that he is “preternatu- lic Theatre, downtown, to the Eugene starred and . rally, even prenatally, thin-skinned.” He O’Neill Theatre, on Broadway, Tony (The film was nominated for twenty-one says, “I would like to care less about the Kushner left his apartment on the Upper Emmys and won a record eleven.) things other people say about me, but I West Side and ambled east through In Kushner’s view, however,“Caroline, can’t imagine caring less. I think people . He was seeking out Be- or Change”—a semi-autobiographical pay heavy prices for armor and callous- thesda Fountain and the statue of an account of the relationship between a ness.” Still, he adds,“it’s very hard to take angel that graces it to ask for blessing. For Southern Jewish boy, who has lost his criticism when it’s inept, when it kills the luck, on opening nights, Kushner usually mother, and his family’s saturnine maid, chances of that show being seen.” performs two rituals: before the curtain Caroline—is his best-told story.Based on For a while, he sat on the low perim- goes up he sings Cole Porter’s “Begin the “unexpected hidden life” of the Kush- eter wall of the Bethesda plaza, enjoying the Beguine”—a song that, according to ner family’s maid, Maudie Lee Davis, the the scene. His gaze finally came to rest his will, must be played, along with script is a radical departure from the stan- on the blousy bronze angel in the center Brahms’s Fourth and Mahler’s Resurrec- dard forms of Broadway musical distrac- of the fountain, which plays an important tion Symphony,at his funeral (“I envision tion. With its focus on race, class, and role in the finale of “Angels in .” a lengthy service,” he has written. “Bring even economics,“Caroline” celebrates the In the Biblical tale of Bethesda, an angel lunch”); then, while the show is on, he ambivalent, instead of the upbeat.When appears on the surface of a pool and gives slips away for a Chinese meal. On this it opened last year at the Public, it earned the water healing powers. The statue, occasion, however, Kushner found him- a strong critical response, not all of it pos- Kushner explained,“commemorates the self doubly in need of luck. Not only itive. For some critics, the show’s psycho- naval dead of the Civil War. It’s the first would the opening of “Caroline” mark logical subtlety was hidden beneath the commissioned sculpture by a woman in his return to Broadway after more than a folkloric, seemingly simplistic style of the New York—Emma Stebbins, the sister decade but a revised, nearly four-hour production. (“ ‘Caroline’ might be regarded of the parks board president and a les- version of his play “Homebody/Kabul” as the brooding person’s ‘Hairspray,’” Ben bian.” He went on, “The other thing I was beginning a limited engagement at Brantley wrote in the Times.) Kushner love about it is that it got terrible reviews the Brooklyn Academy of Music. felt, he says, “hugely disappointed” and when it was unveiled.” Kushner had last been represented on only “cautiously,but definitely,endorsed.” Broadway in 1993, with “Perestroika,” Nevertheless, throughout the winter ushner is a purveyor of what he calls the second part of his seven-hour epic, and into the spring, bolstered by the K“brave art”—“the best sense we can “.”The first major play growing demand of the Public’s audi- make of our times.” Several weeks be- to put homosexual life at the center of its ences and by the success of the Nichols fore “Caroline” opened on Broadway,in a moral debate, “Angels” covered territory film, Kushner worked the phones and debate sponsored by the Classic Stage that ranged from Heaven to earth, from called in favors until a consortium of Company,one of Kushner’s great cham- the AIDS epidemic to conservative poli- twenty Broadway producers put up five pions, the critic Harold Bloom, spent the tics, encapsulating, in its visionary sweep, million dollars to move the musical to better part of two hours trying in vain the sense of confusion and longing that Broadway. No one was going to get rich, to get Kushner to admit that he was a defined late-twentieth-century Ameri- their mantra went, but Broadway would theological writer. “I’m somebody who can life. “It gave a language to that gen- be the richer for it. The Broadway open- believes in . . . a kind of relationship of eration,” the director George C. Wolfe, ing meant another round of reviews. “It complaint and struggle and pursuit be- who staged both “Angels in America” would be lovely if suddenly there was sort tween the human and the divine,” Kush- and “Caroline, or Change” on Broadway, of this Pauline conversion and people ner said finally.“And part of that struggle says. “It gave playwrights permission to were coming and saying,‘I was wrong the involves politics. For me, drama without think about theatre in a whole new way. first time; it’s great now,’ ” Kushner said. politics is inconceivable.” A play could be poetic, ridiculous, fragile, “But that isn’t going to happen. Tomor- He is fond of quoting Melville’s he- overtly political, sentimental, and brave all row there’ll be some wonderful things roic prayer from “Mardi and a Voyage at the same time.”“Angels” won Kushner and also maybe some not-so-wonderful Thither” (“Better to sink in boundless two Tonys and a Pulitzer Prize. Last De- things. Then we have to take a deep deeps, than float on vulgar shoals”), and LEVINE DAVID

42 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 3, 2005

TNY—01/03/05—PAGE 42—133SC. In theatre, Kushner is a purveyor of “brave art,” which he defines as “the best sense we can make of our times.”

TNY—01/03/05—PAGE 43—133SC.—LIVE OPI ART—R 13521 takes an almost carnal glee in tackling the tuba and spouting water from her mouth. (He refers to Samuel Beckett as “that most difficult subjects in contemporary “Homebody/Kabul,” which began with a matzoh of a playwright.”) In his 1995 history—among them, AIDS and the con- first-person monologue, morphed into a collection of essays,“Thinking About the servative counter-revolution (“Angels in third-person drama, moving unexpect- Longstanding Problems of Virtue and America”), Afghanistan and the West edly from closeup to long shot. With its Happiness,” Kushner writes, “A good (“Homebody/Kabul”), German Fascism visions and poetic fulminations, “Angels play, like good lasagna, should be over- and Reaganism (“A Bright Room Called in America” expanded the expressive lim- stuffed. It has a pomposity, and an over- Day”), the rise of capitalism (“Hydrio- its of naturalistic theatre. Likewise,“Car- reach. Its ambitions extend in the di- taphia, or the Death of Dr. Brown”), and oline, or Change” used its visual, sonic, rection of not-missing-a-trick, it has a racism and the civil-rights movement in and linguistic vernacular to create a kind bursting omnipotence up its sleeve.” the South (“Caroline, or Change”). But of American folk opera, in which the his plays, which are invariably political, worlds of white privilege and African- he swashbuckling quality of Kush- are rarely polemical. Instead, Kushner re- American impoverishment were woven Tner’s intellectual aspirations is not jects ideology in favor of what he calls “a together in a dreamlike fable that bore borne out by his demeanor. At forty-eight, dialectically shaped truth,” which must the influence of Kushner’s friend Mau- he is tall, courtly, unassuming, and flat- be “outrageously funny” and “absolutely rice Sendak, with whom he has written a footed, with a tangle of wiry black curls— agonizing,” and must “move us forward.” children’s book and an opera libretto. his “wackadoo hair,” as his friend the di- He gives voice to characters who have Underneath Kushner’s prodigious flow rector calls it. He is by been rendered powerless by the forces of language is a sense of incantation, nature a “fummfler”—what Sendak calls of circumstance—a drag queen dying of which draws the spectator in and com- “the Jewish fumbler who is in perfect con- AIDS, an uneducated Southern maid, con- pels him to listen. His writing is defined trol, who uses his comic character to some- temporary Afghans—and his attempt to by fluency and excess. He wrote the first how make everyone feel comfortable and see all sides of their predicament has a sly draft of the opening monologue for loose.” He talks extraordinarily fast, with subversiveness. He forces the audience to “Homebody/Kabul” in forty-eight hours, a machine-gun-style delivery that reflects identify with the marginalized—a hu- “Caroline” in four and a half months, both his swiftness of mind and his ner- manizing act of imagination. and he had just finished a two-hundred- vousness. At the same time, his pace gives Kushner also has what he calls “a and-eighty-three-page draft of a screen- him a distinct comic advantage. When boundless appetite” for exploring the play for about the after- delivering the Class Day speech at Co- dramatic form. An early dance-theatre math of the 1972 terrorist attack during lumbia University earlier this year, he re- piece, “La Fin de la Baleine: An Opera the Olympic Games in Munich, which he minded the students that he had been for the Apocalypse”—about bad love, wrote in three weeks. “I like big, splashy, their fourth choice—after Warren Buf- the blues, the bomb, and bulimia—in- juicy plays,” Kushner says. “I like the au- fett, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader cluded a woman dancing on point with a dience to feel space to roam around in.” Ginsburg, and . “I think I should begin by acknowledging your dis- appointment that I am not Jon Stewart,” he said. “Your disappointment that I am not Jon Stewart will last one morning. I am disappointed at not being Jon Stewart every morning of my life.” To graduates at Bard, where he was awarded an hon- orary degree, he observed, “I cherish my bile duct as much as any other organ. I take good care of it. I make sure it gets its daily vitamins and antioxidants and invigorating exposure to news of Antonin Scalia and everyone else working for the Bush fam- ily.” At Cooper Union, receiving another degree, he began his speech by pronounc- ing President Bush’s words of the previous day: “Thank you and good evening. I’m honored to visit the Army War College. Generations of officers have come here to study the strategies and history of warfare. I’ve come here tonight to report to all Americans, and to the Iraqi people, on the strategy our nation is pursuing in Iraq and the specific steps we’re taking to achieve our goals.” He paused, then added,“I just “And this is our department of experimental accounting.” wanted to feel what it felt like to say that.”

TNY—01/03/05—PAGE 44—133SC.—LIVE OPI—A10136 When Kushner speaks in public, his lingual. She had huge lung power. She was an angry man and you were angry gambit is often to share with his audi- could breathe into a candle flame and so I gave you to Daddy.’ ” A third child, ence a little secret, some complaint that control the flicker of it with her breath.” Eric, who was born in 1961, absorbed his downplays his own prestige: he’s tired; He also says, “She saved a good deal of parents’ professional ambitions. “They he’s nervous; he’s unprepared; he’s over- her truthfulness, the things she couldn’t pushed Eric into music,” Lesley says. worked; he doesn’t know what to say. say in the quotidian, for her music.” “Every single week, they would drive him “He keeps dismantling himself, remind- The youngest of four children from a to New Orleans for horn lessons, four ing himself of how weak he is and how first-generation socialist Jewish family hours each way.” (Eric is now first horn many frailties he has,” Nichols says.“He in New York, Sylvia was noisy and emo- for the Symphony Orchestra.) lets you see the vulnerability.It’s part of a tional. Her father, an early member of In 1969, Sylvia underwent a mas- genius’s self-protection.” the glazier’s union, had been tectomy, and nine years later “I don’t look like Keanu Reeves,” fierce and abusive. As a result, William became the maestro Kushner said in a 1994 interview. “So according to her sister, Martha of the Lake Charles Sym- when people express an interest, which Deutscher, Sylvia “was a needy phony—events that changed happens rarely but does . . . I sort of go, person who was massively inse- the family dynamic. While ‘Well, why?’” Mayer says,“He’s very dis- cure about herself.” Kushner’s Lesley and Eric gravitated to- paraging about his chin, his nose, his older sister, the artist Lesley ward their father, Tony main- weight. You don’t imagine him lying on Kushner, was born, in 1954, with tained the closest bond to Syl- the beach in a bathing suit.” Kushner is severe hearing loss; she couldn’t via. From an early age, he’d constantly at war with his body, alter- speak and couldn’t easily com- been a fervent reader of com- nately indulging and starving it. Between prehend what was said to her. ics—“I wanted to write books, 1988 and 1993, when he was writing Her frustration kept her in a to be an illustrator,” he says. He “Angels in America,” he gained about more or less permanent tantrum. made up his own stories for a hundred pounds. “I used to say, ‘I’m To spend more time with her the comic characters and wrote pregnant. I’m eating for eight,’ ” he says. and Tony, William and Sylvia, then in their dialogue. “Momma read them and Then, just as dramatically, he shrank their early thirties and playing for the would delight in them,” Lesley recalls. himself down. Opera, decided to move “She thought they were funny. Every- back to Lake Charles, where William thing he said she just found delight- n 1969, when Kushner was twelve, his could earn a living in his father’s lumber ful.” Tony was equally enchanted by his Imother, Sylvia, learned that she had business. But Sylvia felt isolated in the mother, who had theatrical aspirations. breast cancer. (After a long remission, she South.“Leaving music professionally was At six, he watched her perform in Arthur died of inoperable lung cancer, on Au- very difficult for her,” William says. “She Miller’s “” at the gust 27, 1990.) At one point, when she hadn’t succeeded as an artist,” Kushner local theatre-in-the-round. “As Linda was in a hospital in New York, he badgered explains.“There was a sense of the world Loman, she changed from my beautiful his father, William, to buy him a pocket having not gotten her, and not appreci- young mother . . . to an old woman in the watch, then had it engraved with the ated her. She was furious about it.” course of the evening,” he wrote in 1997. words “Cogito, Ergo Sum” (a motto he’d When Kushner was born, in 1956, he “It was terrifying and wonderful....I acquired from Marvel comic books, not entered a family dominated by an atmo- don’t think I ever saw her the same way Descartes).“A thinker or nothing,” he ex- sphere of regret, disappointment, and, in again.” Over the years, he watched Sylvia plains.“Because the body,clearly,betrays.” the case of his older sister, murderous play Anne Frank’s mother, and Beatrice William Kushner, a Southern Jew rage.“There was just no way to tell her, no in “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man- from Lake Charles, Louisiana, who had way to make her understand,” William in-the-Moon Marigolds.”“I really think studied at Juilliard, had been playing first recalls of Lesley’s rancor over the sudden that it was seeing those plays and the spe- clarinet with the New Orleans Sym- appearance of her brother. She had to be cial sort of power that her being in them phony when he met Sylvia Deutscher, physically removed from Kushner’s third- gave to them that started me on a lifelong who, as first bassoonist, was one of the birthday party; when her father drove her fascination with the theatre,” he has said. first American women to hold a chair in away from the house, she tried to throw Kushner has come to realize that Wil- a major orchestra. She had been a profes- herself out of the car.The brutality of her liam’s love of writing—he and his family sional musician since she was twenty- behavior was, William says, “pretty dev- were great reciters of poetry and dog- three. In addition to touring with Sadler’s astating” to Tony—“it gave him a great gerel—was also an important influence Wells and playing with the New York sympathy with other people who were on him. But, in his youth, what he got City Opera, she had recorded with Stra- mistreated.” Until Kushner reached high from his father was a sense of worry— vinsky and played at the first Pablo Casals school, he and Lesley were at war. Add- the idea “that there was something wrong Festival. Kushner says of his mother’s ing to the tension, according to Kushner, that he was trying to fix.” As a boy,Kush- music, “That nasal but open-throated, was the fact that Sylvia had different no- ner was not assertive or athletic.“I would deep wooden vibrato sound echoed tions of femininity than Lesley,who was become angry with Tony,frustrated with through my childhood. I think the idea of a tomboy. “She took you and kind of re- his helplessness,” William says. “He fluency made itself felt in me as some- jected me,” Lesley wrote in a recent e-mail wanted something from me that I wasn’t thing musical before it became something to Tony. “Or as she put it, ‘My father giving him,” Kushner recalls. William

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TNY—01/03/05—PAGE 45—133SC.—LIVE SPOT—17299—PLEASE REPORT AND INSPECT ON QUALITY amount of praise on me, but I remember the thrill in her voice when I told her I had won some debate tournament, or when I got an agent, or when I got a grant or a good review or any indication that what she expected—which was that I would be a successful artist—was going to come to pass. She would simply say, ‘Go! Go! Go!’ in a crescendo of pitch and volume, when I brought her good news.” Speaking of the special connec- tion between Sylvia and her children, Lesley says, “She kind of moved into your skin with you. You couldn’t tell if it was what you wanted for yourself or what she wanted for you. It was a sort of ven- triloquist sensation.”When Kushner was accepted to program at ’s Tisch School of the Arts, Sylvia came to see him a couple of times a year. “She visited with him and “Why don’t we just stay by this rock and take nobody else,” Martha Deutscher says.“It day trips around the local area?” was always the two of them.” Once, when Sylvia, Kushner, and Deutscher were •• having coffee in the Village, Kushner and his aunt began to tease his mother about some of her attitudes. “She turned to me tried unsuccessfully to interest him in didn’t know how to get protection, be- and said, ‘Don’t you turn my son against , ball games, bird-watching, sailing, cause I was too embarrassed.” me!’” Deutscher recalls.“She was not jok- and an Outward Bound course (they got For years, Kushner was, by his own ing. She didn’t want to share him.” as far as the orientation meeting). Around admission, a terrible student. Then, to When Kushner’s play “A Bright puberty,he began to give his son pep talks his astonishment, in high school he be- Room Called Day” was staged in Lon- about sex. Kushner says, “As I got older, came a verbal athlete: a champion de- don in 1988, Sylvia flew over for the he figured it out. He finally said, ‘I think bater. “I may have been a sissy, but I was opening. It was panned.“She collapsed,” you’re a homosexual, and I want you not not without aggression,” he says. “I be- Deutscher says.“When my mother died, to be a homosexual. I want you to go to a came this incredibly mean arguer. I would I realized that a certain degree of my therapist and fix it.’ I was about sixteen.” not be defeated.” He was also opinion- ability to take pleasure in my own ac- Kushner had known that he was gay ated: in high school, he refused to stand complishments was gone,” Kushner says. for almost a decade. He remembers rub- for the Pledge of Allegiance; he leafletted “Without her to show it to, to do it bing the shoulders of his handsome Ku Klux Klan members for George Mc- for—a circuit had been broken.” Above Sunday-school teacher and thinking, Govern; as early as junior high school, he his writing desk at his country house, in Oh, this is fun, and also I shouldn’t be alone on his debate team argued in favor Manitou, New York, is a huge framed doing this. Those impulses sent him of feminism. But his talent gave him, for copy—signed by the poet—of Robert through childhood with a sense of fraud- the first time, a sense of his own power Duncan’s “My Mother Would Be a Fal- ulence. “You feel you are unacceptable to and a society to which he belonged. “I conress,” which reads, in part: everyone, even to your parents, who love found the smart kids,” he says. My mother would be a falconress, you but wouldn’t if they knew,” Kush- As Kushner was finding his lung and I her gerfalcon, raised at her will, ner says. His persistent nightmare was of power, his mother was losing hers. In from her wrist sent flying, as if I were her own his classmates finding out “and killing 1969, following her mastectomy, she was pride, as if her pride me or burning the house down.” His overradiated and developed osteomyelitis knew no limits, as if her mind high-school friend Tom Tolin, an econo- in her ribs, some of which had to be re- sought in me flight beyond the horizon. mist, says,“I remember him sitting in the moved.“She was in a lot of pain, couldn’t bleachers and these guys around him giv- laugh, couldn’t be hugged, and, of course, exuality was one of the ways in ing him a hard time, calling him ‘Kush- she couldn’t play the bassoon,” Kushner Swhich Kushner broke away from his Kush.’ He just sat there with his head says. Her ambition settled instead on Tony, mother and, like the poem’s falcon, flew buried in a book. It was painful.” Kushner whose Promethean itch had its origins “far, far beyond the curb of her will.” recalls, “I hated the kids that I was going in her aspirations for him. “It was this Kushner’s parents had hoped that with to school with, the boys especially—ag- huge thing to her if I succeeded,” he says. therapy his latent heterosexuality could gressive, nasty, physically intimidating. I “I don’t recall her ever lavishing a huge be reinforced. When he was twenty-five,

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TNY—01/03/05—PAGE 46—133SC.—LIVE OPI—A 9926—#2 PAGE he called home to tell Sylvia that he was understand something about life, the idea where together; they had no secrets. gay. “She cried for a month,” he says. that a thing can be both one thing and its Flynn had, Kushner says, a “vast appetite “She was just heartbroken by it. I finally opposite, that two opposites can exist si- for pedagogy—she loves explaining said, ‘I’m not going to call you anymore multaneously and not cancel each other things to people” and was “a great syn- until you stop, because it’s getting creepy. out. Or they can transform one another thesizer.” Kushner, in turn, had a vast cu- I feel like I’ve died.’ ” through conflict into something new.” riosity. “She led and I followed,” he says. Although he now refers to his “desire- Kushner had already gravitated toward “She read Walter Benjamin and told me based identity” and an “endlessly raging the stage. He had attended theatre and I should. And Marcuse, Adorno, Hork- libido,” he had difficulty, at first, accept- opera in New York, designed sets and heimer. I had read some Freud and some ing his orientation. In his second week as props for university productions of “The Marx, but not nearly as widely.” He con- an undergraduate at Columbia, in 1974, Fantasticks” and “Marat/Sade,” served for tinues, “As soon as I started writing, or Kushner presented himself at the health a year and a half as the drama critic of the constructing plays, she would read, com- center and asked to see a therapist. “I’m Columbia Spectator, and written his first ment, make suggestions. I would call her gay and I want to be straight,” he said. dialogue in a playwriting class. By the time my dramaturge, but Kim was that to the He is, he says,“sexually flusterable.”“The he graduated, he had also fallen under power of twenty.” Inevitably, though, first time I ever saw two men kiss was the spell of Brecht’s “A Short Organum there were struggles over ownership of when I was a freshman at Columbia and for the Theatre,” which set out the play- ideas. In 1982, Kushner formed a theatre it completely freaked me out,” he said wright’s aesthetic for epic theatre—his company with several people, includ- in an interview last year. “It still took attempt to engage the audience in a play ing Flynn and his first boyfriend, Mark another three years before I began to of contradiction that encouraged active Bronnenberg, to produce “La Fin de la come out of the closet.” When Kush- critical thought and departed from the Baleine,” among other plays. Flynn con- ner did come out, according to the actor passive emotional catharsis encouraged tributed the ideas; Kushner created the Stephen Spinella—who met Kushner in by the Aristotelian principles of drama. stage images, and got most of the credit graduate school at New York University, “I wanted to be Bertolt Brecht,” Kushner for the show, which caused some bad and later starred in “Angels in Amer- says. He applied to N.Y.U., and, once feeling between the friends. ica”—“he exploded. It was like a train. there, studied under the German-born In 1984, Flynn was riding in a cab as it He was out, out, out.” director Carl Weber, a Brecht specialist. sped up the West Side Highway when the A decade later, in 1995, Kushner and In his senior year at Columbia, while car went out of control and off the road, Michael Mayer, who had also met as directing a university production of Ben ramming into a tree in Riverside Park. students at N.Y.U., found themselves, Jonson’s sprawling epic “Bartholomew During the next few days at the hospital, in the company of such celebrities as Fair,” Kushner had become friends with Flynn’s garbled sentences, her repetitions, Roy Lichtenstein and , at the Kimberly Flynn, a Barnard psychology and her inability to distinguish left from White House, during the first term of major from New Orleans, who was work- right indicated to her, even before the doc- the Clinton Administration. Kushner ing on the stage crew.“We fit together in- tors confirmed it, that she had suffered was seated at Al Gore’s table. “I wore tellectually and, in some ways, emotion- brain damage. Just as Kushner’s theatrical a triangle made out of pink rhinestones. ally, on a kind of molecular level,” he career was taking off—he was appointed Gore asked me what it was and I got to says. Kushner and Flynn went every- the assistant director of the St. Louis explain it to him,” Kushner recalls. After dinner, there was a dance.“We were slow- dancing together next to Senator Alan Simpson and his wife, the Gores, ev- eryone,” Mayer recalls. “We may be the first men ever to dance together in the White House.”

ushner, in his senior year at Colum- Kbia, took Edward Tayler’s famous course on Shakespeare. “Tayler taught Shakespeare in a profoundly dialectical way,” Kushner says.To understand Shake- speare, Tayler told his students,“you only need to count to two.” From him, Kushner learned that everything in Shakespeare was paradoxical and contradictory—and that this collision of opposites was the first principle of drama. He left Tayler’s lec- ture on “Henry IV, Part 1” “shaking and in a fog.” He recalls,“I was having trouble breathing. I felt like, Oh, I’m beginning to “I just get a little tense before everything.”

TNY—01/03/05—PAGE 47—133SC.—LIVE OPI—A10050 Repertory Theatre in 1985, and became 1991 at the Public Theatre in New York. ner. “I can’t get these people to change the associate artistic director of the New “A fatuous new drama,” called fast enough,” he complained to Eustis. York Theatre Workshop in 1987—Flynn it in the Times. “An early front-runner “At first, I thought he was being self- was stymied, and she directed some of for the most infuriating play of 1991.” For indulgent,” Eustis says. “What became her enormous fury at Kushner. She told all its intelligence and ambition, the play clear is that the difficulty in these people The New Yorker,“It was hard to deal with was dramatically inert.“I made an outline changing was the subject of the play.” how angry I was, and with the idea that I of twenty-four scenes,” Kushner says. “I What eventually emerged was an epic was jealous and that I was in no position to wrote twenty-four scenes. Each scene was discourse on American life that mixed be jealous—I was out of the game.” Kush- exactly what I put down in the outline.” social reality with theatrical fantasy, nat- ner agonized over moving to St. Louis. Eustis says,“Tony understood everything uralism with Judaism and magical real- “I’ve had to make the hardest decisions else about theatre, but he didn’t under- ism. It told its story in numerous di- of my life around Kim’s illness,” he has stand about reversals, how that worked. alects—camp, black, Jewish, Wasp, even said. His guilt about her disaster and the The theatre is about change, so change Biblical tones. At the same time, it pro- difficulty of taking care of her is evident has to happen in the course of the play. vided a detailed map of the nation’s sense in “Millennium Approaches,” the first In ‘Bright Room,’ you’d have scene after of loss.“Millennium Approaches” charts part of “Angels in America.” “She was scene of characters coming out, beauti- the heyday of the Reagan Presidency everywhere in it,” he says. (He gave Flynn fully expressing how they feel, then leav- through a series of characters who ruth- ten per cent of the profits.) ing the stage without changing at all.” lessly pursue their own sexual and public Flynn eventually recovered sufficiently After the San Francisco run ended, destinies: Prior Walter, an AIDS patient, is to become a full-time political activist, Kushner began work on what he envi- abandoned by his lover, Louis, at the time focussing on environmental issues. But in sioned as a taut, one-set musical about of his most profound need; Joe, an ambi- 1996, right before Kushner began work AIDS. As he started to write for the first tious bisexual Mormon Republican chief on “Homebody” and “Caroline,” he and time about his own time and place— clerk, leaves his lost, pill-popping wife, Flynn decided to alter the nature of their about homosexuality, AIDS, and right- Harper, for a man; and Roy Cohn, the friendship. “We tried very hard to figure wing American politics—the play quickly notorious right-wing lawyer and fixer, a out a way of staying close,” he says. “We began to exceed his ambitions for it.“For closeted homosexual who is also dying of were just making each other, by the end, the first-rate artist, there is a moment AIDS, rationalizes his own sensational ra- terribly, terribly unhappy.” He contin- when he’s really getting revved up, and pacity.(Cohn, whom Kushner portrayed ues, “It was an important turning point the time just flows into him,” Mike Nich- with Jacobean relish, personifies the bar- for me.” In his cramped one-room office ols says.“It only happens once. It happens barity of individualism.) In “Perestroika,” in Union Square, Kushner keeps a pho- without his awareness at all. He planned which ends four years after “Millennium,” tograph of himself with Flynn at Be- nothing. He was just going ahead doing in 1990, Kushner explores the possibility thesda Fountain. this next thing.” of progress and community, of redemp- As Kushner was writing “Angels in tion. Harper finally accepts the failure of ushner’s “A Bright Room Called America,” he gave himself to the charac- her marriage and sets out on her own. KDay,” which is dedicated, in part, to ters, not to the outline; instead of impos- Louis reconciles with Prior—in a scene Flynn, crosscut the effect of the rise of ing an ideology on them, he followed that took Kushner years to write.“Failing Hitler on a group of friends in in their lead. “I was two acts into ‘Millen- in love isn’t the same as not loving,” Louis the early thirties with a rant on American nium’ and I didn’t know what the fuck I says. “It doesn’t let you off the hook, it politics that linked Fascism with the Rea- was doing,” he says. “So I thought, I’m doesn’t mean . . . you’re free to not love.” gan revolution. It was meant, Kushner gonna ask a character. Who’s most like Twenty-four characters, eight acts, says, as “a warning signal, not a predic- me? Louis. So I sat down, and I said, fifty-nine scenes, and an epilogue: “An- tion.” The play,which was workshopped ‘What is this play about?’ I waited a few gels in America” turned the struggle of a in New York in 1985, drew little press minutes and then ‘Why has democracy minority into a metaphor for America’s attention, but the director Oskar Eustis succeeded in America?’ popped into my search for self-definition. “I hate this saw one of the performances.“Tony’s gift head. Then Louis began to qualify him- country,” a gay black nurse called Belize for language was completely apparent,” self, as he always did—the first of my big says to Louis. “It’s just big ideas, and he says. “He was deeply, specifically in- logorrheics. I wrote the line ‘There are stories, and people dying, and people like terested in politics, in political theory and no angels in America.’ Then I wrote on you. The white cracker who wrote the how it related to political practice.” He the side to myself,‘Louis is wrong.’”The national anthem knew what he was goes on, “ ‘Bright Room’ was about what story seemed to suggest itself from there. doing. He set the word ‘free’ to a note all Tony’s plays are about—people who Still, the writing wasn’t easy for Kush- so high nobody can reach it.” Although feel themselves inadequate for the de- “Angels” was not the first play to explore mands that history has put on them.” the AIDS pandemic—Larry Kramer’s po- Eustis produced and directed “Bright lemical “The Normal Heart” (1985) pre- Room” in 1987 at San Francisco’s Eureka ceded it—it was the first to explore the Theatre, where it had a succès d’estime. particular claim of the disenfranchised to But East Coast critics were less enthusi- a romantic vision of America. “We will astic when they saw a reworked version in be citizens,” Prior announces to the audi-

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TNY—01/03/05—PAGE 48—133SC.—LIVE SPOT—N44425E-DIGISHOP—PLEASE REPORT AND INSPECT ON QUALITY “Can I have a pony?” •• ence at the finale. “The time has come.” happiest days of my entire life,” he says. Times, spoke of “Angels” as “this vast, mi- By the fall of 1988, it had become clear “Millennium” had its first major pro- raculous play,” and Variety went even fur- that the play would need two evenings to duction in Declan Donnellan’s version at ther:“ ‘Angels in America’ is a monumen- run its course, which meant that Eustis London’s Royal National Theatre, in tal achievement, the work of a defiantly couldn’t afford to produce it at the Eureka January,1992. After a workshop of “Per- theatrical imagination.” In Charlotte, Theatre. “A two-evening show about estroika” at the Taper in May of that North Carolina—and in university towns AIDS by a playwright nobody had heard year, both parts of the play were per- in rural parts of Indiana and Texas—fun- of. I mean, it was just disastrous,” Eustis formed together for the first time, over damentalists staged protests to stop sub- says. In the end, he chose the play over his two nights, in November. By then,“Mil- sequent local productions, a move that theatre company. He left the Eureka for lennium” had won the London Evening Kushner referred to in The Nation as “un- the Mark Taper Forum, in , Standard ’s award for best play.When the constitutional, undemocratic and deeply where the artistic director, Gordon Da- Mark Taper box office opened for the unwise.” (A decade later, when the Nich- vidson, had agreed to workshop “Millen- complete production of “Angels,” the re- ols film aired on television, the climate of nium” and, eventually, to mount both ceipts broke the theatre’s record. At the tolerance that “Angels” helped to create halves of the play together under Eustis’s Taper première, most of New York’s the- was used as a criticism of the play.When directorship.The plan took a few years to atrical establishment and its major critics Kushner begins writing, he jokes about complete. It wasn’t until the spring of were in the audience. Backstage, Kush- needing to banish his “inner John Simon,” 1991, almost a year after Kushner’s mother ner wrote a letter to the cast and pinned the voice of the acerbic theatre critic of had died, that he was able to wrench the it on the bulletin board. “And how else New York, whom he imagines saying, three-hundred-page draft of “Perestroika” should an angel land on earth but with “You’re completely terrible and everything out of himself—in an eight-day writing the utmost difficulty?” it said. “If we are you write is shit.” But Simon’s attacks— spree in a cabin on the Russian River, in to be visited by angels we will have to call real or imagined—are nothing compared Northern , where he holed up them down with sweat and strain, we with the grapeshot vitriol of Lee Seigel in with a box full of junk food and cold cuts. will have to drag them out of the skies.” The New Republic.“ ‘Angels in America’ is “I would sleep two hours at a stretch, get The plays, if not the Taper production, a second-rate play written by a second-rate up, write the next scene, and it just went were triumphant.“Angels” was hailed as a playwright who happens to be gay, and on and on,” he says. He finished the play turning point for theatre, for gay life, and because he has written a play about being on April 11th. “It was maybe one of the for American culture. Frank Rich, in the gay,and about AIDS, no one—and I mean

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TNY—01/03/05—PAGE 49—133SC.—LIVE OPI—A10037 no one—is going to call ‘Angels in Amer- ica’ the overwrought, coarse, posturing, formulaic mess that it is,” Seigel wrote.) CRUELTY (Vermont, 1965) fter “Angels in America,” Kushner Afound it hard to start another play. That was the year my friends were reading Nonetheless, he wanted to be useful. He Antonin Artaud and Jean Genet. thought about training to be a teacher, a The idea of cruelty felt important, lawyer, a nurse. Instead, according to Eu- like being so perfect an outlaw stis, “he reinvented himself as a public you became a saint. The war was on, intellectual,” becoming, among other muffled, distant. Where we were things, one of America’s most prominent everything happened a few years later gay-rights activists. His essays—some of than it did in New York or San Francisco. which began as speeches delivered at gay- Some would say it was too easy rights events—addressed sex, homosexual for us to be there, talking liberation, and socialism. He argued in de- about almost anything. Too easy now fense of the activist and playwright Larry to say we didn’t have a clue. Kramer; of the controversial choreogra- I made it through the first few chapters pher Bill T.Jones; and of Matthew Shep- of Artaud, and never got to “Saint Genet,” ard, the Wyoming student who was mur- although I remember the cover clearly, dered because of his sexuality.“Campaign the dome of his head, his eyes, the stare for homosexual and all civil rights—cam- paign, not just passively support,” Kush- ner exhorted the readers of his article on more than twelve thousand dollars a talk, unto themselves, beneath which their legs Shepard, which appeared in The Nation in he is the equivalent of a rock star. (Once eventually buckle? . . . Is it an unseemly 1998. “Matthew Shepard shouldn’t have when he spoke at Brown, loudspeakers yet uncontrollable desire to slither?” died. We should all burn with shame.” had to be placed outside the hall for the The apotheosis of Kushner’s kvetching In 1995, Kushner was asked by Presi- overflow audience; last April, at Middle- persona was his appearance, in robe and dent Clinton to submit some ideas for the bury,in the school’s auditorium, he spoke slippers, at a fund-raising event for Friends forthcoming State of the Union address. to a standing-room-only crowd.) Still, in Deed, a charity that provides support In a letter, Kushner set out the tenets of Kushner is a playwright who is an activist, for people with life-threatening diseases. his version of American democracy:“You not an activist who happens to write plays. Declaiming at a panic-stricken Gilbert- need to be the full-blooded liberal Dem- One of the few serious playwrights who and-Sullivan clip, he read from his “diary”: ocrat I believe you want to be.You need to know how to write a joke, he is also one of Wednesday, August 28, 2002. Mike Nich- tell the American people that you stand the few political speakers who know how ols called today. He wants a favor: Could I for a strong Federal government, fully to deliver one. “When Republicans are write a funny ten-minute play for a benefit empowered to regulate industry, protect upset, they fall over. Have you noticed for some group he’s on the board of, Friends of something-or-other. I love Mike. I would the jobs and lives of American workers, this?” he asked Cooper Union’s graduat- do anything for him. There’s no one I admire and protect our extremely endangered en- ing class last June, before pointing out or adore more in the whole industry, maybe vironment (and our health along with it). that Nixon had tripped at a New Orleans in the whole world. He’s really a great man, so busy and yet has the time to organize You have to declare war on the anti-tax, trade show, Gerald Ford often fell down something like this. Wow! Me sharing the anti-government movement, calling it stairs, Bush senior had fallen and then stage with six other incredibly intimidating what it is: a scam perpetrated against the vomited on the Japanese Prime Minister playwrights of whom I am insanely jealous. Sounds like fun! I’m sure Mike doesn’t love middle class, the working class and the (“And he was the Bush who was good at Robbie Baitz more than me. poor in the interests of maximizing prof- foreign relations!”), and Bush junior had “Two people alone on an empty stage its for multinational corporations and the collapsed while eating a pretzel. “What for ten minutes.” They can’t mean a literally empty stage. Props and costumes, surely. And very rich. . . .You have to have the courage are they expressing, these falling people?” sets. Maybe five people. Would anyone com- you had in 1992 to declare that grown-up he asked.“A spiritual vertigo? The insup- plain if mine was fifteen minutes long? And responsible citizens of a democracy pay portable weight of all the power and does it have to be funny? Funny is hard. I wonder if we get paid for this. . . . taxes.” He ended his eight-page letter ponderous wealth they have arrogated with a plea for social justice: “You must Friday, October 25, 2002. I have a cold. I think I’m gaining weight again. I wish Mike support affirmative action, poverty,edu- had never asked me. I can’t write. . . . Why cation, child care and jobs creation pro- did Mike ask me? Maybe he was mad at me. grams, and anti-discrimination legisla- Maybe he’s resentful that he’s been stuck film- ing my play since before the first Bush ad- tion which includes sexual orientation.” ministration and he’s doing this to humiliate (Clinton read the letter, but nothing from me. I bet he wishes he could call it made it into the speech.) in for rewrites. . . . My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? is These days, when Kushner visits col- writing one! I’m doomed! It’s not a competi- lege campuses, where he can command tion. It’s not a competition. . . .

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TNY—01/03/05—PAGE 50—133SC.—LIVE SPOT—N50148A—PLEASE REPORT AND INSPECT ON QUALITY sive that, while “Caroline, or Change” was in rehearsals, Wolfe and the com- pany made a legend of it. They were working in the large, high-ceilinged Mar- that claimed he knew something tinson auditorium at the Public The- I would never know. My friends atre—where a roof window looks down moved on to de Sade. And now on the stage—when a pebble fell down it occurs to me that during all those years onto the floor. Wolfe joked, “Tony’s hid- I never said “I love you” to anyone, ing up there. Jeanine”—Jeanine Tesori, although I probably should have lied who wrote the music for “Caroline”— at least twice, to see if it was a lie. “takes food up there so he can eat while Meanwhile, the fields and mountains promised watching us ‘destroying’ his piece.” to remain the same, and they didn’t. Taking issue with Kushner is not easy. Great poems told us that nature “It’s like standing in front of a Mack would never betray us, but that truck,”Tesori says. A few days before the really wasn’t the point, was it? show was to open on Broadway, she and And then the theatre of cruelty Kushner still hadn’t fine-tuned the epi- stopped being shocking. logue. Wolfe insisted that he needed the We all knew why. scene the following night. Sitting at a table in her studio, Tesori said to Kush- —Lawrence Raab ner, “It’s too long.” “No, it’s not,” he replied.“Sometimes you need length. ‘Angels’ is full of places Tuesday, November 5, 2002. I couldn’t still consider Oskar one of my most im- that shouldn’t work but do, and they’re write today, I had to go vote. I am optimistic, portant collaborators,” Kushner says. “I long.” no matter what the polls say. Tomorrow, WITHOUT FAIL, I will write this play. . . . I will spend hours with him weekly when I’m “I don’t care what worked in that,” be in a good mood after the election. It’ll be writing, talking about what I’m doing. I Tesori said.“That’s not this. It’s too long.” easier to write then. send him everything I write.” “Well, we’re just gonna have to agree Wednesday, November 6, 2002. I wish I For Broadway, George Wolfe was to disagree.” was dead. . . . brought in to energize the production of “Well, we’re just gonna have to stare Wednesday, November 13, 2002. . . . “Angels.” “Tony is nothing if not intru- at each other till one of us does some- Something will come. ANYTHING. Who cares? sive,” Wolfe says. “He completely trusts thing,” Tesori said. It’s a benefit, for God’s sake! They took my name off the goddam ad! . . . me, but I think, ultimately, he’d prefer to For ten minutes or so, Kushner and do it himself.”Wolfe admits to occasion- Tesori stared at each other in silence. Thursday, November 14, 2002. Mike just nixed my idea: a reunion. ally burning Kushner’s extensive and “Finally, he conceded, ‘Well, maybe “Two people alone on an empty stage,” that’s fevered production notes, “because I get we can move the first line?’ ” Tesori re- what he said. And then he refuses to cooper- so hostile about some of the things he calls. “I said, ‘Maybe we could.’ Then he ate! He’s ruined everything. Thanks a LOT, Mike. Schmuck! See if I ever do you a favor writes.” As a play gets to previews, started shifting.” again! according to Wolfe, “his mind, not hav- ing a lot to do, starts to obsess about n May,Kushner broke his usual pattern f Kushner’s laughter is combustible, so, everybody else’s work. He starts to spin Iand agreed to attend the Broadway Iin certain theatrical circumstances, is his wheels. Now, the first time you en- opening of “Caroline,” along with Mark his temper. Eustis recalls,“One time, after counter the spinning of the wheels you Harris, his partner of six years, whom he seeing a run-through of ‘The Illusion’”— try to go inside and figure out every single married in a ceremony on April 27, 2003. Kushner’s 1989 adaptation of Corneille’s spoke of the wheel.Then, over time, you (They were the first same-sex couple to comedy and his first commercial suc- go, ‘Madness, madness, madness, mad- have their wedding announced in the cess—“he called me from his apartment ness, oh, really strong truth. Let me hold “Vows” column of the Sunday Times.) after he’d destroyed every piece of furni- on to that.’ You have to reach inside the By the time the couple took their seats ture.” He adds,“There was one particular hurricane and pull out that beautiful little at the Eugene O’Neill—they were in moment where Tony told me that it was baby.”Kushner is quite aware that Wolfe Row T of the orchestra, the seats farthest a mistake for me to ever have directed and thinks he’s a few sandwiches short of a from the stage—they had already con- I should give up the field. That was dev- picnic.“He doesn’t think I’m insane, just a sumed their lucky sesame noodles and astating. I can’t tell you how many direc- very neurotic person,” Kushner says.“We dumplings and Kushner had successfully tors he’s tried to get fired at crucial mo- were at dinner somewhere, and he looked sung “Begin the Beguine.” The lights ments in the process.” Although Eustis at a bouquet of beautiful flowers.‘This is went down, and Kushner leaned for- didn’t finish the job on “Angels,” Kushner what you’re like,’ he said, and snapped off ward, with his chin in his hands, to watch has worked hard to make sure that their one of the smallest flowers.‘Oh, now the as the reimagined drab basement of his relationship didn’t end there and he now whole thing is completely ruined.’ ” childhood home came into view and Car- pays Eustis to dramaturge his plays. “I Kushner’s intrusiveness was so perva- oline, played by Tonya Pinkins, entered

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TNY—01/03/05—PAGE 51—133SC. with an armful of laundry to broadcast by towering maples and oaks. Through mal frustration,’” Kushner says.“The way the mood of the brooding household: the sloping trees, the river was visible. children learn is that the task they have in Nothing ever happen underground Amtrak’s Hudson Line hugged the shore, front of them is always a little too difficult In Louisiana and every twenty minutes or so a train and forces a degree of concentrated angry ’Cause they ain’t no underground hurtled by, blaring its presence. Kushner attention. It should be a struggle. It’s fun In Louisiana There is only barely registered the sound. “I always to struggle. We’re born to it.” Underwater. write best here,” he said. “It reminds me Just as he was leaving Manitou, Kush- of Louisiana, in that it’s so verdant.” ner got a call from a distraught Larry When the show was over, the au- He went on, “Inside me, it’s like a fist Kramer, whose play “The Normal Heart,” dience, including Kushner, stood and unclenching.” recently revived at the Public, had failed to cheered. Then he slipped into the aisle, For Kushner, the house has other find Broadway backing. Kramer was call- where he, Tesori, and Wolfe, with their happy associations.When he found it, six ing to say that the producers were closing arms around each other and their heads years ago, he had been ready to renounce the show that night. Kushner paced the touching, jumped up and down in a hud- New York altogether. “I thought, Fuck driveway,commiserating, and they agreed dle. A few minutes later, for the first time this,” he says.“I’m just giving up on men. to lament together over dinner. “We’ll on an opening night, Kushner took a bow It hasn’t happened. It’s not going to hap- meet up and set ourselves on fire,” he said. from the stage. He made a dismissive pen. I’ll give up and move out of the flourish to the crowd with his left hand, city.” Kushner closed on the house in couple of weeks later, Kushner was then disappeared into the back row of the March of 1998; on April 16th of that A back at work, mixing his activism cast. Afterward, when the rehearsal light year, at a party given by Michael Mayer, with his art. For a MoveOn.org fund- was up and only a few people lingered in he met Harris, a droll and intelligent raiser last summer, he went back to “Only the orchestra, Kushner looked at the ropes man, seven years his junior, and an editor We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be and winches and out at the empty audi- at large at .“Tony Unhappy,” a play-in-progress that de- torium. “Western civilization can’t have had this lovely combination of brazen picts Laura Bush attending an after- been so terrible if it made a machine like confidence, enthusiasm, and huge inse- school reading program for dead Iraqi this,” he said. “It really is a great gadget.” curity that I found appealing,” Harris re- children. For the event, he added a sec- The joy of the opening dissipated in calls. A few days later, Kushner invited ond scene, in which the First Lady, an the following weeks under the pressure Harris to dinner at his place and pre- admirer of Dostoyevsky’s writing, comes of the awards season, which was likely pared about five pounds of pasta. “This onstage to debate the play’s literary mer- to decide the commercial future of the was so Tony,” Harris says. “It was like a its with the playwright himself. Since show. The prospect of competing in the cauldron the size of a chemical-waste the first scene was published in The Na- musicals category rattled Kushner, who container on his stove. He bought a fo- tion—the first play that the magazine saw “Caroline” as “more like a play.” In caccia the size of a tire. He’d made a salad has printed in its hundred-and-thirty- an e-mail, he wrote, “ ‘Caroline’ has as that could comfortably feed ten. I was nine-year history—Patricia Clarkson, much in common with the shows it’s up completely terrified. ‘This guy is gonna Marcia Gay Harden, and Vanessa Red- against, some of which I really like, as think I hate his food because he’s given grave have all played the role of Laura marquetry has to do with Olympic to- me a week’s worth.’ ” Bush, who was invited to read the part bogganing. It makes me nuts.” In the Kushner stayed in the city, but Mani- herself. (Her office did not respond.) end, “Caroline” won only one Tony, los- tou is still his favorite retreat. In his house, Kushner likes to collect amusing tid- ing the awards for best musical and for he has gathered pictures of Sylvia and bits about political figures. According best book to “Avenue Q ,” a jaunty show her bassoon and of William and his clar- to his research, Supreme Court Justice with puppets. But by the time “Caroline” inet, as well as the last photograph taken William Rehnquist has led judges and got its closing notice, in mid-July—its of his maternal great-grandparents in lawyers in sing-alongs of “Dixie”; Judge final Broadway performance was on Au- Vilnius before the Holocaust. Even the Jay S. Bybee, who wrote a controversial gust 29th—Kushner had fought his way light fixtures outside his front door carry memo justifying torture, plays in an all- through the gloom. “I’m devastated but a memory of the past—they are from kazoo orchestra; and President Bush fine,” he said. “I can’t join in with the Temple Sinai, his childhood synagogue, refers to the First Lady as “my lump in general lamentation over the wretched in Lake Charles. Above his desk, in a the bed.” In the new scene of “Only We state of Broadway,which has never really cabin at the bottom of the garden, where Who Guard,” Kushner, in full “fumm- been in any other kind of state.” (“Caro- he goes to write, hangs a photograph of fle,” brings this up. “So I guess my point line,” at least, has had a second life at the Tennessee Williams, smiling over a bottle is that we’re all like you,” his character Ahmanson Theatre, in Los Angeles, and of wine. Harold Bloom told Kushner re- says to Laura Bush.“That we’re all being will open this month in San Francisco.) cently that Williams “is your most distin- fucked by your husband.”The First Lady guished ancestor in the American drama takes umbrage and gets up to leave. As a n a hazy afternoon in late June, and one who I think you’ll wind up ri- parting shot, she scolds Kushner.“Using OKushner and I drove to his country valling.” The two playwrights share, at the stage, the theatre, ART! For, for tawdry place in Manitou, in the Hudson Valley,a least, a belief that struggle is the natural propagandizing? You oughta be ashamed two-story house, with forest-green shin- order of things.“I’m deeply aware of what of yourself,” she says. gles and a red door, shaded on all sides developmental psychologists call ‘opti- “I always am,” Kushner replies.

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