He
received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993 for his play, Angels in
America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and co-authored with Eric
Roth the screenplay for the 2005 film, Munich.

This
is the forty-seventh post in a series highlighting the best gay and 
lesbian authors from the 20th century (with a few before and after that
period) who have recorded in fiction, and nonfiction, the history of
gaypeople telling what life is, and was, during an important time of
history.

In
addition to being a prize-winning playwright, Tony Kushner has become a
celebrity spokesman for gay politics and AIDS activism.
Kushner was
born into a Jewish family in New York City, but grew up in Lake Charles,
Louisiana. Although he recognized his homosexuality at a very young
age, he did not come out until early adulthood. He left Louisiana to
attend Columbia University as an undergraduate and stayed in Manhattan
to study theater directing at New York University, where he cofounded
the Heat and Light theater cooperative.

In
addition to the two-play cycle Angels in America, Kushner is the author
of three children's plays; of adaptations of works by Corneille,
Brecht, Ansky, and Goethe; and of the original dramas A Bright Room
Called Day (1987), Slavs! (1994), which is included in a collection of
essays, Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness
(1995), and Hydriotaphia or The Death of Doctor Browne (1999). By the
late 1990s, by virtue of the extraordinary theatrical and critical
success of Angels in America, which garnered him a Pulitzer Prize and
two Tony Awards (among other honors), Kushner had become a celebrity
spokesman for gay politics and AIDS activism.

Kushner
acknowledges the creative influence of literary figures such as Herman
Melville, Bertolt Brecht, and Walter Benjamin. Melville's influence is
manifest in the breadth and poetry of Angels in America. Brecht's
insistence on socially conscious, proletarian drama is evident in
Kushner's depictions of normal people in politically charged crises, and
Benjamin's mysticism and apocalypticism inform Kushner's sense of
history as wreckage and his alertness to historical turning points. Like
Goethe and Brecht, Kushner is committed to a theater of ideas.

Kushner's
plays frequently use startling juxtapositions to provoke analysis and
thought. A Bright Room Called Day, for instance, takes place in the
declining Weimar Republic of the 1930s. However, the action is
interrupted periodically by the political, social, and apocalyptic
commentary of a young, punk, Jewish woman living in Reagan-era New York.
This device explicitly invites us to compare Adolph Hitler and Ronald
Reagan.

Kushner's most recent dramatic project is a trilogy
concerned with money. The first installment is entitled Henry Box Brown,
which dramatizes an African-American slave's escape from the South in a
packing box. He is also at work on a prose book whose working title is
The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, With a
Key to the Scriptures.

Kushner's most
famous drama, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes--Part
One, Millennium Approaches, premiered in 1991; Part Two, Perestroika,
premiered in 1992--might be characterized (to use a phrase coined by
Sarah Schulman in her novel Rat Bohemia) as "fabulous realism." Its
success is due in part to its sheer audacity in fusing disparate
character and plot elements. Its power results from the complexity of
the characters, its accessible and poetic language, and its persistent
optimism even in the face of disaster and loss.

In
addition to taking its issues seriously, Angels, which is usually
performed over two nights, also takes its audiences seriously, offering
them ideas as well as action. Not surprisingly, the play has elicited
provincial criticism for its frank sexuality and leftist politics.
Kushner's
plays examine many of the issues that also figure in his own gay
activism: liberalism and socialism in a post-Marxist age;
communitarianism in a culture that privileges individualism;
spirituality (particularly informed by Jewish kabbalah mysticism) in a
secular era; erotic experience as a portal of the transcendent; and
sexuality, ethnicity, and race in a postidentity age. Kushner, viewing
his sexuality not as a stable identity but as a dialectical subject
position, regards it as an artistic and political asset that provides
him an outsider's vantage point from which to analyze social
relationships.
Thomas Lawrence Long
        
List of works
Plays
The Age of Assassins, New York, Newfoundland Theatre, 1982.
La Fin de la Baleine: An Opera for the Apocalypse, New York, Ohio Theatre, 1983.
The Heavenly Theatre, produced at New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, 1984.
The Umbrella Oracle, Martha's Vineyard, The Yard, Inc..
Last Gasp at the Cataract, Martha's Vineyard, The Yard, Inc., 1984.
Yes,
Yes, No, No: The Solace-of-Solstice, Apogee/Perigee, Bestial/Celestial
Holiday Show, produced in St. Louis, Missouri, Imaginary Theatre
Company, Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, 1985, published in Plays in
Process, 1987.
Stella (adapted from the play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe), produced in New York City, 1987.
A
Bright Room Called Day, produced in New York, Theatre 22, 22 April
1985; San Francisco, Eureka Theatre, October 1987; London, Bush Theatre,
1988), Broadway Play Publishing, 1991.
In Great Eliza's Golden Time, produced in St. Louis, Missouri, Imaginary Theatre Company, Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, 1986.
Hydriotaphia, produced in New York City, 1987 (based on the life on Sir Thomas Browne)
The
Illusion (adapted from Pierre Corneille's play L'Illusion comique;
produced in New York City, 1988, revised version produced in Hartford,
CT, 1990), Broadway Play Publishing, 1991.
In That Day (Lives of the Prophets), New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, 1989.
(With Ariel Dorfman) Widows (adapted from a book by Ariel Dorfman), produced in Los Angeles, CA, 1991.
Angels
in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Part One: Millennium
Approaches (produced in San Francisco, 1991), Hern, 1992.
Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Part Two: Perestroika, produced in New York City, 1992.
Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (includes both parts), Theatre Communications Group (New York, NY), 1995.
Slavs! Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness, Theatre Communications Group, 1995.
Reverse
Transcription: Six Playwrights Bury a Seventh, A Ten-Minute Play That's
Nearly Twenty Minutes Long, Louisville, Humana Festival of New American
Plays, Actors Theatre of Louisville, March 1996.
A Dybbuk, or
Between Two Worlds (adapted from Joachim Neugroschel's transation of the
original play by S. Ansky; produced in New York City at the Joseph Papp
Public Theater, 1997), Theatre Communications Group, 1997.
The Good Person of Szechuan (adapted from the original play by Bertolt Brecht), Arcade, 1997.
(With Eric Bogosian and others) Love's Fire: Seven New Plays Inspired by Seven Shakespearean Sonnets, Morrow, 1998.
Terminating,
or Lass Meine Schmerzen Nicht Verloren Sein, or Ambivalence, in Love's
Fire, Minneapolis, Guthrie Theater Lab, 7 January 1998; New York: Joseph
Papp Public Theater, 19 June 1998.
Henry Box Brown, or the Mirror of Slavery, performed at the Royal National Theatre, London, 1998.
Homebody/Kabul, first performed in New York City, 19 December 2001.
Caroline, or Change (musical), first performed in New York at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, 2002.
(Director)Ellen McLaughlin, Helen, produced at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, 2002.
Only We Who Guard The Mystery Shall Be Unhappy, 2003.
Translation with “liberties”—but purportedly “not an adaptation”—of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (2006)[5]
The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures Minneapolis, Guthrie Theater, 2009.
Tiny Kushner, a performance of five shorter plays, premiered at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, 2009[6]
Books
A Meditation from Angels in America, HarperSan Francisco, 1994.
Thinking
about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness: Essays, a
Play, Two Poems, and a Prayer, Theatre Communications Group (New York,
NY), 1995.
Howard Cruse, Stuck Rubber Baby, introduction by Kushner (New York: Paradox Press, 1995).
David
B. Feinberg, Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS
Clone, introduction by Kushner (New York: Penguin, 1995).
David Wojnarowicz, The Waterfront Journals, edited by Amy Scholder, introduction by Kushner (New York: Grove, 1996).
"Three
Screeds from Key West: For Larry Kramer," in We Must Love One Another
or Die: The Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer, edited by Lawrence D.
Mass (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), pp. 191–199.
Moises Kaufman, Gross Indecency, afterword by Kushner (New York: Vintage, 1997), pp. 135–143.
Plays by Tony Kushner (New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 1999). Includes:
A Bright Room called Day
The Illusion
Slavs! Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness
Death & Taxes: Hydrotaphia, and Other Plays, Theatre Communications Group (New York, NY), 2000. Includes:
Reverse transcription
Hydriotaphia:
or the Death of Dr. Browne, (adaptation of Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial (A
fictitious, imaginary account of Sir Thomas Browne's character not based
upon fact)
G. David Schine in Hell
Notes on Akiba
Terminating
East Coast Ode to Howard Jarvis
Brundibar, illustrated by Maurice Sendak, Hyperion Books for Children, 2003.
Peter's Pixie, by Donn Kushner, illustrated by Sylvie Daigneault, introduction by Tony Kushner, Tundra Books, 2003
The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present, 2003
Save Your Democratic Citizen Soul!: Rants, Screeds, and Other Public Utterances
Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, with Alisa Solomon, Grove, 2003.
Essays
"The Secrets of Angels". The New York Times, 27 March 1994, p. H5.
"The State of the Theatre". Times Literary Supplement, 28 April 1995, p. 14.
"The Theater of Utopia". Theater, 26 (1995): 9-11.
"The Art of the Difficult". Civilization, 4 (August/September 1997): 62-67.
"Notes About Political Theater," Kenyon Review, 19 (Summer/Fall 1997): 19-34.
"Wings of Desire". Premiere, October 1997: 70.
"Fo's Last Laugh--I". Nation, 3 November 1997: 4-5.
"Matthew's Passion". Nation, 9 November 1998
"A Modest Proposal". American Theatre, January 1998: 20-22, 77-89.
"A Word to Graduates: Organize!". Nation, 1 July 2002.
"Only We Who Guard The Mystery Shall Be Unhappy". Nation, 24 March 2003.
Other works
La Fin de la Baleine: An Opera for the Apocalypse, (opera) 1983
St.
Cecilia or The Power of Music, (opera libretto based on Heinrich von
Kleist's eighteenth-century story Die heilige Cäcilie oder Die Gewalt
der Musik, Eine Legende)
Brundibar, (an opera in collaboration with Maurice Sendak)
Munich, a film by Steven Spielberg (2005) - screenplay (co-written by)