Kushner, Tony (1956-…), an American playwright, created a sensation with his long drama Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on American Themes (1993). The seven-hour play was divided into Part One: Millennium Approaches (1991) and Part Two: Perestroika (1992). The first part won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for drama.
In Angels in America, Kushner said he wanted to create a portrait of what it meant to be gay during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980’s. The play also satirizes the American political scene of the time. Angels in America blends fictional characters with real people and varies imaginatively between realism and fantasy. The drama includes dozens of characters, all intended to be played by eight actors. The central figures include Louis and Prior, two gay men; Joe and Harper, a married couple; and a lawyer based on the real-life attorney Roy Cohn. Critics praised Kushner for the eloquence and humor of his writing.
Kushner was born in New York City on July 16, 1956. He graduated from Columbia University in 1978 and received a master’s degree in fine arts from New York University in 1984. Kushner wrote six plays before Angels in America, including a children’s play and three adaptations of other works. Only his original play A Bright Room Called Day (1991) gained much attention before he exploded on the national theater scene with Angels in America. Kushner wrote Homebody/Kabul (2001), a long and complex drama about the clash of Western and local cultures in modern Afghanistan. Kushner again used his skill with language to argue social and political ideas in the family drama The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures (2011).
Kushner collaborated with the American children’s illustrator Maurice Sendak in Brundibar (2003), a picture book based on an opera that was performed by children in the early 1940’s, during World War II, in a German concentration camp. In addition, he wrote the lyrics and story for the chamber opera Caroline, or Change (2003). Kushner has also written several screenplays.
See also Angels in America.
