American playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner on religion, audience and hope
Kushner spoke with Eleanor Wachtel in 2011 about his celebrated plays
As Writers & Company wraps up after a remarkable 33-year run, we're revisiting episodes selected from the show's archive.
Tony Kushner is an award-winning American playwright and screenwriter.
He's best known for Angels in America, which embraces the themes that mark his work: politics, the metaphysical world, Judaism, and gay rights. Angels in America won virtually every theatre award, including two Tonys, a Pulitzer Prize, two Drama Desk Awards for Best Broadway Play of 1993 and '94, London's Evening Standard Award and the New York, London, Los Angeles,and San Francisco Drama Critics Circle Awards.
It was also chosen by London's National Theatre as one of the best 100 plays of the 20th century and was made into a six-hour HBO miniseries directed by Mike Nichols, starring Meryl Streep, Al Pacino and Emma Thompson.
Kushner studied theatre at New York University and worked as a director as well as a playwright. Until Angels in America, he'd had moderate success as a writer and adapter, especially of the classics like Goethe and Corneille. After Angels, Kushner wrote more plays, including the 2011 The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, but for most of the past dozen years, he's focused on writing for the movies.
His screenplay for Steven Spielberg's 2012 movie Lincoln was nominated for an Oscar and won the New York Film Critics Award, as well as Boston and Chicago's Critics' Awards. Kushner also wrote the screenplay for Spielberg's award-winning remake of West Side Story in 2021 and the following year, he co-wrote the script for Spielberg's autobiographical film, The Fabelmans, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Earlier this year, Kushner won the PEN/Mike Nichols Writing for Performance Award.
In 2011, he talked to Eleanor Wachtel about his plays Angels in America and The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures and how they relate to some of the world's biggest questions.
On atheists, as an agnostic Jew
"I have a great fondness now for atheists because people who actually announce it as this creed, I don't really know how they get their absolute certainty. Because my experience of the world, although it's a very subjective thing, admittedly, is not that there's nothing — I mean, we just don't know enough.
"Everything that physics tells us now is that our perspective is too finite and too limited and too specific for us to claim the kind of absolute certainty about anything. When people like Richard Dawkins are telling me that they are absolutely certain that there's [no higher power out there] that means something to me.
He's a very smart man and he knows a lot about science and I'm essentially enumerate, so I don't know anything about it. It's probable that one could eventually, or some kind of being could eventually make sense of the workings of the material universe without having recourse to the divine.
It's becoming clearer that there are challenges posed to our very limited understanding of what reality is by modern physics all the time.- Tony Kushner
"But it's becoming clearer that there are challenges posed to our very limited understanding of what reality is by modern physics all the time. One is beginning to talk then about something beyond what certainly Marx would have understood as materialism or the material realm."
Gauging the audience
"Laughter is really important in a theatre. At the beginning of a play, everybody has to start with some good joke because when the audience makes that noise, it's talking to itself.
"It's going, 'Oh, here we are. What kind of a creature are we?' Every individual goes, 'Well, did I find that joke really funny or am I surrounded by idiots?'
"Or the joke really is funny and everybody is like, 'Oh my God, this is great.' The actors immediately know, 'Well, last night it made a big happy noise and this night it made a big, but sort of slightly barky angry noise and the next night it doesn't make a noise at all.'
[The audience] knits together into the entity that it's going to be for the rest of the performance through laughter.- Tony Kushner
"[The audience] knits together into the entity that it's going to be for the rest of the performance through laughter. Weeping does the exact opposite. It makes the collective disintegrate.
"People are ashamed. It's embarrassing to cry. You're vulnerable. You lose a certain amount of force. Although I think that there are complicated ways that people can stay connected to each other through grief, I think because we're strangers in an audience for the most part, it's hard to do it. Some people cry easily and some people don't and so it happens in different ways. Some people are more ashamed or less ashamed.
"But when an audience is really paying attention, it's very quiet and focused and that's great. When it's paying attention and really getting sad, it's almost like some sort of heavy hot air just pushes down on the audience and it's a strange place to go. I don't really understand it all that well.
"It's something that I'm very interested in exploring now."
Hope as means for change
"I still believe, as I've said many, many, many times, that hope is a moral obligation, that hope is not just a feeling state. it's a decision, it's a choice. People who are fortunate enough to live in circumstances that make it possible to hope have an obligation to search hard for plausible occasions for hope, places whence.
"Change can be anticipated and it's not all that hard to look for. It's not deluding yourself to think, 'Okay, if we do this, then this can happen and that can happen…'
"Even in these terrible places we're in now, I think that it's imperative that we recognize that hope can be a force for transformation, but it begins as an internal choice.
Hope can be a force for transformation, but it begins as an internal choice.- Tony Kushner
"Despair is both excruciatingly painful and also wonderful. That the surrender of power, of the possibility of historical agency is a great luxury. It relieves you of all responsibility.
"It relieves you of the necessity, among other things, to straddle your own contradictions. It means you can be pure because it doesn't matter. You're not going to be involved with history, which is inherently dialectical and therefore never pure and it makes life a little bit easier. You can have a very luxurious, nice life and live a life of complete despair and not even ever call it despair.
"Hope, I think, immediately propels you into more uncomfortable places."
Tony Kushner's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
