At age 53, Tony Kushner finds himself at the very height of his powers and influence. He has just completed a high-profile screenplay on the life of Abraham Lincoln for director Steven Spielberg. Sometime next season on Broadway, producer Scott Rudin will present Kushner’s latest Broadway play, a family drama called “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism.” Last spring, the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis presented an entire festival devoted to his work. Next season, New York’s Signature Theatre Company will do the same, including the first major New York revival of Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, “Angels in America.” And not only is Kushner awash in new projects, but some past works, such as his troubled Broadway musical “Caroline, or Change,” have recently found a fulsome American afterlife that has eclipsed their initial New York reception.
Opening on the cusp of an American political sea change and staged almost in the shadow of the Obama family’s Kenwood home, the Court Theatre’s 2008 revival of Kushner’s most autobiographical show (it concerns his Louisiana family’s relationship with its African-American maid) not only outsold any previous Court show, but that rapturously received production seemed to perfectly capture that fervent summer on the South Side of Chicago. Pretty much the entire Obama campaign staff came to see it.
So did Kushner, who was spotted crying in his seat. “I gave Tony a hug,” Charles Newell, Court’s artistic director, said. “He wouldn’t let me go.”
Amid all of this, Kushner has continued to play the role of public intellectual, delivering numerous (and frequently controversial) speeches and conversations about politics, engagement and culture, including his appearance Nov. 8 at the Chicago Humanities Festival, where he will collect the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize.
The honor comes at a pivotal moment for Kushner. On the one hand, he is demonstrably in grave danger of overextension and potential exhaustion. Consumed by the Lincoln screenplay (the movie is due for release in 2011), Kushner struggled to complete the script of “Guide” in time for its pre-Broadway opening night at the Guthrie in May, resulting in a fraught situation in which critics from major newspapers, including the Tribune, were first invited and then, at the last minute, asked by Kushner not to come, as he did not feel the play was ready. Rehearsals had begun without a completed script.
On the other, his long-prodigious intellect and his perennial ability to combine dramatic political agitation with a deep sense of emotional need has deepened into an acute awareness of human frailty. Many of those close to him say he is now doing his very best work.
And then there is the matter of political idealism versus pragmatism, a conundrum that has preoccupied Kushner since he first tapped out a monologue, but now has reached a fever pitch.
“This is really a crucial time for Tony,” says Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of New York’s Public Theatre and Kushner’s closest artistic confidant. “His huge subject now is, how do you actually change the world? How do you chart a course that is pragmatic on strategy and yet uncompromising on principle?”
Eustis pauses. “Tony and I are in our 50s. We have had some success. We are part of the establishment. He has influence. He can make choices that affect things. So what works ? What is most exciting to me is that Tony is beginning to grapple with that, not just on a practical but on a theoretical level. I find that tremendously exciting because there is nobody in whom I have more trust.”
Idealistic vs. pragmatic
Spend time talking to Kushner in his Harlem writing digs, and it rapidly becomes clear that his current model is Lincoln.
In fact, the Lincoln screenplay is pretty much an attempt to answer Eustis’ question about how to chart the right relationship between the idealistic and the pragmatic. The decision to collaborate with Spielberg did not come easy, even though the two had worked on the 2005 movie “Munich.”
“I turned Steven down twice,” Kushner says, sitting at his table. “I’d read Gary Wills’ ‘Lincoln at Gettysburg.’ And I had always turned to the second inaugural address, which is the most beautiful piece of writing in political history. I thought, this is someone like Shakespeare or Einstein or Newton. How do you reduce him to a dramatic character?”
But Spielberg rented a hotel room and brought in a large group of Lincoln scholars, including Doris Kearns Goodwin. Kushner was persuaded to get over his intimidation. “I realized that I would be in the company of the greatest American who ever lived,” Kushner says. “Everything in American history flowed into the Civil War. Everything that has happened since flowed out of it. It is the navel of our national existence.”
Kushner decided to focus on the last few days of Lincoln’s life. “The problems with the left’s take on Lincoln,” he says, “is that there is an obsession with silliness. Was he a racist? Did he really end slavery by himself? That kind of thing. Lincoln was reviled by the left, all of the way up to his election, all of the way though his administration … but one of the many paradigms of Lincoln is that there is nothing more powerful in a secular democracy then a progressive centrist in the White House and a Congress controlled by the center-left. These guys ended human slavery as an official sanctioned institution. It was the end of the Middle Ages. They saw that the meaning of the Civil War was twofold: the preservation of the Union and the end of slavery. Lincoln’s immortal genius was in convincing the American people that you could not have one without the other.”
The third draft of the screenplay, Kushner says, was turned in on the night of the election. “I was finishing it up as we watched the returns come in,” he says. Kushner had been an early supporter of Hillary Clinton, but he says he pulled the lever for Barack Obama. And he says he wants no part of the pervasive view among his fellow leftists (and fellow gays) that Obama is failing to deliver.
“It is very evident for me that Obama is following the Lincoln playbook,” Kushner says. “I don’t think his promises are hollow. He has two wars, a collapsed economy and the entire ecology of the planet in catastrophic shape. It will take a while.”
As Kushner now sees it — through a Lincolnesque haze, perhaps — a central problem with the American left wing is its lack of practical patience. An unwillingness to stomach what he calls Lincoln’s “bobbing back and forth.”
“In the 1960s, a great percentage of the left abandoned the idea of government,” he says. “That’s the great tragedy of the last 50 years. A lot of the left went into this kind of inert anarchism, and anarchism is nonsense. It’s like the people in 2000 who voted for Ralph Nader. I think most people have now learned the lesson that the two major parties are not the same. Politics is not an expression of your personal purity.”
And the necessity for revolution? “The lesson of the last 300 years is that revolution can really shake things up,” Kushner says, “but violent revolution disrupts something that doesn’t seem to be reparable, or possible to reassemble into sanity. Too often, the aftermath of violent revolutions is the gulag. Or terror.”
Politics and emotion
For anyone who has attended past Kushner events — such as a memorable one at Northwestern University, where Kushner’s criticism of Israel provoked mass walkouts — this might sound like unusually conciliatory language.
It is, for sure, rather different in tone. But in truth, Kushner’s works have always combined politics with unvarnished emotion and an expressed need for hope.
There’s no question that “Angels” was a critique of American religious and moral hypocrisy and the inability of gay Americans to get their political act together. But one could also detect a palpable sense of longing in the play for spiritual redemption. In the middle of the AIDS epidemic, the attendee of too many funerals didn’t spend much time pondering ideology.
Kushner’s own sense of frailty, coupled with a certain impatience, seems to have only intensified. When he talks about the great dramatic theorist Bertolt Brecht, for example, he points out that Brecht’s interests in community weren’t just political but a response to human mortality.
“It makes sense to me,” says Martha Lavey, the artistic director of the Steppenwolf Theatre and a longtime Kushner admirer, “that Tony would now be unpacking those kinds of truths.”
“Death is not a nice process,” Kushner says. “There are emotional and physical burdens. Our huge capacity to connect makes our losing immensely difficult. But you can work on it by watching others. And it is a biological fact that the individual is fiction. The smallest reducible unit is two people, not one. What we really are is a network of relationships.”
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Attend the awards presentations
2009 Chicago Tribune Literary Prize
Lifetime achievement award for Tony Kushner
10 a.m. Nov. 8
Symphony Center Armour Stage
220 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago
2009 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize Winners
Jayne Anne Phillips for fiction, “Lark & Termite,” and Nick Reding for nonfiction, “Methland”
2 p.m. Nov. 8
Northwestern University School of Law
Thorne Auditorium
375 E. Chicago St., Chicago
To order tickets for the Chicago Tribune prizes, call 312-494-9509, Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., or go to chicagohumanities.org. All proceeds will benefit the Chicago Tribune Holiday Campaign, a campaign of Chicago Tribune Charities, a McCormick Foundation Fund.
