Tony Kushner and Politics
Dramaturgical work by Jason Crutchfield

Tony Kushner, a gay, Jewish, socialist believes “all theatre is political. If you don’t declare your politics you are probably right-wing” (Blanchard 42). Indeed Angels in America, written near the end of the first Bush administration, and set during the Reagan years doesn’t shy away from Kushner’s trademark left wing political slant nor does it pull any punches in openly criticizing Reagan and right wing conservatives in general. One of the most remarkable things about Angels is how for a “political play” it has seemingly stood the test of time and found acceptance from both right and left wingers, gay or straight. When asked about the difficulties of finding an audience for his politics, Kushner says “what I found in the audience response is a huge hunger for political issues and political discussion. So I always wonder: is it that Americans don’t like politics, or is it that so much theater that is political isn’t well done?” (Bernstein 12)
Kushner viewed the early 90s as being a “huge transitional period” for America, stating that the time where society is in “the greatest amount of flux and stress, are always the riches times for the theatre in any culture” (Marvel 84) Playwrights of this era found “themselves responding to the breaking apart of the silent majority that Republicans spent so many years constructing, which was always a fiction anyway” (Marvel 84). This breaking apart of the majority opens up new issues that that seem fit for theatrical debate. As Kushner puts it, “I think that’s what theater should be: a platform for social debate that has blood in it” (Marvel 84)
Kushner has never been one to shy away from his disdain for Reagan or republicans in general. Comparing Reagan and George H.W. Bush to Nazis, Kushner says that
leaders like Reagan and Bush are essentially as morally debased as the people who followed Hitler. Bush may not be as psychotic—I think Reagan probably is—but whether or not they sound as crazy or have the same mustache, these are people who fundamentally place all sorts of ideological agendas and personal success above human rights (Szentgyorgyi 11).
In an article written a week before the 2004 Presidential Election, Kushner decries the fact that 50% of the American population would end up voting for Bush. In the article, titled “An Unmannerly Pre-Election Day Splenetic” Kushner draws several comparisons between today’s political climate and that of the Reagan era, even going as far as to denounce the country as being worse off now than it was then.
Today gray bankers cast off their suits and behave like pit bulls let loose in a slaughterhouse, and no one is surprised. Today the separation of church and state is plowed under, today the coherence of the Constitution is sacrificed to provide a gewgaw for fundamentalist bigots, today the lives of thousands are sacrificed to a half-baked adventure foisted upon the world by a man who slid into the White House with a resume stained by a ruined school system, gun control laws curbed so that people can carry concealed weapons in churches, and of course his nasty gigantic appetite for execution. Who would have dreamed anyone would ever feel nostalgia for anything Republican? But some of us remember when the party did not appear to be driven exclusively by ambition, meanness, and a greed you’d call swinish if pigs weren’t undeserving of the association (Kushner 44).
Kushner doesn’t attempt to predict who wins the election, merely that it will be determined by a slim margin, with 50% of voters going with Bush. Rather than pigeonholing all Bush supporters, Kushner does claim that there are a good many who are decent and intelligent, yet they will return to the White House “an embarrassingly inept, ignorant, incurious, and unfeeling figurehead for the worst conventicler of religious nuts, plutocrats, and petrochemical bagmen ever to lay hold of our federal government” (Kushner 44).
Kushner gives an explanation for why so many intelligent people would choose to re-elect Bush, saying that “one explanation for why the non-idiotic portion of the American conservative community has chosen to swallow its disgust and vote for Bush is this: These people think they can elect him and then control him” (Kushner 44). Further probing, Kushner discovers that many of these people feel that by electing someone who opposes inconsequential issues that the real problems with the world will simply cease to exist.
How can a democrat complain of the people? So I recite the punch line of “The People” when I watch, on CNN, a woman in Keokuk or Terre Haute announce she’ll vote for Bush because he opposes abortion and same-sex marriage. “If I elect a Christian,” she says, “the economy and the war will take care of themselves” (Kushner 44).

Tony Kushner and AIDS
When Kushner first began writing Millennium Approaches in 1988 it was in direct response to “the Reagan counterrevolution, which began in response to the great cultural revolution of the 1960s” (Blanchard 42). One of Kushner’s major criticisms of the Reagan administration was their somewhat lax response to the ever growing AIDS epidemic of the time period. Originally worried that Angels lacked the anger necessary to convey his point, Kushner says “you can’t persuade people who are basically out to destroy you that they shouldn’t do that by being nice to them” (Blanchard 42).
Somewhat controversially, in a 1993 interview conducted by Patrick R. Pacheco, Kushner again compares the Reagan administration to Nazis and views their treatment of the AIDS epidemic as akin to the Holocaust.
The Holocaust has become the paradigm for human evil and then we turn and say there was nothing like it before in history and nothing will be like it in the future. Milosevic is a Nazi and Ronal Reagan is a Nazi. This is not to say that Reagan walks around in black uniform. But he cynically manipulated an issue and allowed the situation to become more dangerous. I think the indifference the West has shown to AIDS in developing countries is genocidal and I wonder how many gay men, who have been so wonderful in responding to men in our own community, will continue to worry about it when, as I hope will happen, medical advances make it into a maintenance illness or get rid of it (Pacheco 54).
In a speech given at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts on World AIDS Awareness Day, Kushner goes into detail about the seriousness of AIDS and how the current administrations lack of compassion towards the subject shows a lack of sympathy. Kushner says
AIDS is both a destroyer and a creator of community. It is not a single entity but a syndrome with ill-defined boundaries and categories, and as such it spreads biologically and politically, making important connections between communities of the disenfranchised by uniting them in pain, in anger, and helping to clarify which lives are regarded as dispensable by America’s ruling class. Those in the margins, unless united in resistance, die (Blanchard 43).
Kushner finds AIDS to be a paradox in that, as great a tragedy and illness as it is it also serves as a learning experience for those with the disease.
When you talk with HIV-infected people, they will frequently tell you, while expressing incredulity and embarrassment at doing so, that their lives have in some ways changed for the better since the incipience of their health crisis. It is too simple to dismiss such statements as compensatory denial…the struggle against AIDS teaches us death, if faced, can be transformed; even cruel, unjust death can be transformed into a resource for the living, of a coming into justice and power (Blanchard 43).
In regards to Angels in America being classified as an “AIDS play” Kushner says
When I started work on Millennium in 1988, a lot of what I was reading and seeing about AIDS was using the illness as a dramatic device, Camille-type model, a way of getting a guaranteed tearjerker finish. It was important to me to create a character with AIDS who was not passive, who did not die at the end, but whose illness was treated realistically. So it wasn’t just one lesion on the shoulder and then a little coughing fit and then he dies in time for the surviving lover to make a moving little speech that gets everybody in the theater to cry and then leave feeling uplifted (Pacheco 51).
Tony Kushner sees the success of Angels as a transitional time period for the country in terms of being able to accept homosexuality, as he says “America watching the spectacle of itself being able to accept homosexuality is good for America” (Blanchard 44). The play has since found a resonance with people of all cultures and time periods, despite early contestations from sources such as The Washington Times which proclaimed “despite the Pulitzer Prize it was just awarded, this play is not for White Bread America. It’s for people who eat bagels and lox, dress in drag and hate Ronald Reagan.” Perhaps the true power of Angels in America can best be summed up by David Savran, who, in a 1994 interview with Kushner, wrote that the play has “proven, against all odds, that a play can tackle the most controversial and difficult subjects—politics, sex, disease, death and religion—and still find a large and diverse audience.”
Tony Kushner’s Influences
Tony Kushner was born and raised in Lake Charles, LA, the son of professional musicians, his mother was also an amateur actress and his earliest experiences with theatre came from seeing her plays. At the age of six, Kushner had developed a crush on his Hebrew school teacher, leading him to discover that he wasn’t like the other boys in his class. Tony had grown up “very, very closeted” and “became intrigued by the sense of disguise theatre could offer” (Savran 20). However, since he had decided to become heterosexual at a very young age, he avoided the local theatres as he knew he would find other gay men there.
In the mid-1970s Kushner attended Columbia University, where he became greatly interested in the writings of Karl Marx. While he did not attend Columbia to study theatre, he was still fascinated by it and began to explore “the mind bending experimental work of directors like Richard Foreman, Elizabeth LeCompte, JoAnne Akalaitis, and Charles Ludlam” (Savran 20). All the while Kushner began to “immerse himself in classical and modernist theatre traditions; and got involved in radical student politics” (Savran 20). It wasn’t until after his graduation from Columbia that Kushner began to “come out” and did so in a way very much reminiscent of Millennium Approaches, by calling his mother from a pay phone in the East Village.
Artistically speaking, Kushner’s greatest influence is Bertolt Brecht. First reading Brecht served as an awakening for Kushner, for it was the first time he had witness a connection between “radical, dignified left politics and theatrical practice.” On Brecht, Kushner says
To me, Brecht is central. Playwrights who aspire to a theater of political analysis and engagement—and who envision the theater as a platform for social debate—can see in the life and work of Brecht what the marriage of art and politics has to offer. I don’t think anybody interested in writing progressive, politically committed theater can possibly avoid dealing with him (Savran 25)
Upon first discovering the writings of Brecht, Kushner describes him as
like a light bulb going off. He teaches you that within what is apparently a naturally occurring event lies a web of human labor and relationships. He teaches you to see that something can be the thing it’s supposed to be, and not, at the same time. I got Marx, I think, through Brecht, and realized that the theater is astonishing in the way it presents that paradoxical sensation (Abramovich 2.1).
Angels in America
Despite being written and set in a very specific time and place, Angels has the ability to leap generations and cultures due to the universality of its characters and themes. The play is about many things, but ultimately it deals with the things that make each of us human, our past, our present, and our futures, and our ability to change along with the time period or be left behind. As Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz says in the opening scene of Millennium Approaches
So I do not know her and yet I know her. She was…not a person but a whole kind of person, the ones who crossed the ocean, who brought with us to America the villages of Russia and Lithuania—and how we struggled, and how we fought, for the family, for the Jewish home, so that you would not grow up here, in this strange place, in the melting pot where nothing melted. Descendents of this immigrant woman, you do not grow up in America, you and your children and their children with the goyische names. You do not live in America. No such place exists (10).
Many of the characters in the play are hiding a part of who they really are. Roy Cohn is a successful New York lawyer recently diagnosed with AIDS, which he finds unbelievable since only homosexuals get AIDS and Roy is not a homosexual, but merely someone who has sex with men. Joseph Pitt, despite being Mormon and married is also secretly a homosexual. His true self isn’t revealed until he meets Louis and begins a relationship with him that eventually leads him to out himself to his mother. Joe’s wife Harper, sensing something wrong with their marriage has taken to becoming a Valium addict and has a life predominantly consisting of elaborate fantasies involving a travel agent known as Mr. Lies. At the center of it all is Prior. Like Roy, he’s also been recently diagnosed with AIDS and as a result of this he breaks up with his boyfriend, Louis. At the end of Millennium Approaches Prior is visited by an Angel that tells him he is a prophet and that “the great work begins” (119).
Bob Blanchard writes that
solace for the characters of Angels in America comes through the experience of hope. Yet the playwright makes a critical distinction: There are two kinds of hope—naïve, childish hope and clear-eyed, knowing hope that is hard won by confronting terrible exigencies and the pain of truly being alive. By the end of Perestroika, it is the latter hope Kushner’s characters have earned (42).
While Millennium Approaches is about the intrusions these characters face in their world of stasis, Perestroika is about the characters learning how to deal with these changes. In his Playwright’s notes to Perestroika, Kushner writes that
the problems the characters face are finally among the hardest problems—how we let go of the past, how to change and lose with grace, how to keep going in the face of overwhelming suffering. It shouldn’t be easy.
At the end of Perestroika, much like in real life, it’s hard to say which of the characters has “won” or “lost.” Instead, we’re presented with an epilogue, four years after the final scene of the play. Four of the main characters sit at the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park discussing we’re they’ve been, where they are, and where they will be. Instead of giving us a happy ending or even an ending the ties everything up, Kushner gives the audience the same sense of hope and the feeling of being on the brink of the unknown that the characters face. Perhaps it is best said in Prior’s final lines of the play
I’m almost done. The fountain’s not flowing now, they turn it off in the winter, ice in the pipes. But in the summer, it’s a sight to see. I want to be around to see it. I plan to be. I hope to be. This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More life. The Great Work Begins (146).

Works Cited
Abramovich, Alex. “Hurricane Kushner Hits the Heartland.” The New York Times. 30 Nov. 2003. p. 2.1

Bernstein, Andrea. Interview with Tony Kushner. Mother Jones Magazine. July/August. 1995.

Blanchard, Bob. “Playwright of Pain and Hope.” The Progressive. Oct. 1994. Vol. 58. 42-44.

Kushner, Tony. “An Unmannerly Pre-Election Day Splenetic.” The Advocate. 26 Oct. 2004. Issue 925.

Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: Millennium Approaches. Theatre Communications Group. 1992.

Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: Perestroika. Theatre Communications Group. 1992.

Marvel, Mark. “A Conversation with Tony Kushner.” Interview. Feb. 1994. Volume 24. p. 84.

Pacheco, Patrick. Interview with Tony Kushner. “AIDS, Angels, Activism, and Sex in the Nineties.” Tony Kushner in Conversation. The University of Michigan Press, 1998.

Savran, David. “Tony Kushner considers the longstanding problems of virtue and happiness.” American Theatre. Oct. 1994. Vol. 11. 20-33.

Szentgyorgyi, Tom. Interview with Tony Kushner. “Look Back –And Forward—in Anger.” Tony Kushner in Conversation. The University of Michigan Press, 1998.