Tony Kushner: Master of stage and film turns his eye to TV

There’s little question that even now, almost 25 years after the fact, “Angels in America” remains Tony Kushner’s most famous work.

The two-part epic first seen by an audience at the little Eureka Theatre in San Francisco in 1991 took the theater world by storm, earning Kushner a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards and, eventually, an Emmy Award when director Mike Nichols filmed it as a miniseries for HBO.

Kushner went on to prove himself a writer of uncommon skill and varied interests, with a keen interest in history. His other works for the stage include an autobiographical musical with composer Jeanine Tesori, “Caroline, or Change,” and adaptations of important plays by Bertolt Brecht and Pierre Corneille. And he has written two films for Steven Spielberg: “Munich,” which he co-wrote with Eric Roth, and “Lincoln.”

As it happens, Kushner will be in town during the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s new production of the monumental “Angels,” which consists of two three-act plays, “Millennium Approaches” and “Perestroika.” But Kushner isn’t planning to see the Rep’s show, running at its downtown venue, Copaken Stage, because his schedule won’t allow it.

Kushner will be the guest speaker at the annual UMKC Pride Breakfast, a fundraiser to benefit the LGBTQIA Leadership Scholarship and the Pride Empowerment Assistance Fund, which provides support to students who may have been cut off by their families after coming out or being “outed.” The acronym stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, intersex and ally.

Kushner said the changes, politically and culturally, for the gay community since he wrote “Angels” are stunning.

“At the end of ‘Perestroika,’ Prior Walter says, ‘We will be citizens. The time has come.’ I believed at the time he was right,” Kushner said. “We had already been fighting at that point for decades and decades — well over a hundred years — for our rights as citizens, simply to be afforded the status of human beings that we were denied in so many ways.

“I simply didn’t have any idea that it was going to be as dramatic and all at once as it’s been in the last two or three years. I don’t think there’s really an analogy in any other history that’s exactly like this. It’s weird. And we’re not there yet.”

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule on same-sex marriage in June.

“I suspect that the Supreme Court may say we’re a protected class, protected by the 14th Amendment,” Kushner said. “There’ll still be homophobia and there’ll still be bigots. But homophobia as a legally sanctioned institution will be dead.

“Long before the (2008) Prop 8 case (in California) … we had been making tremendous strides culturally and politically. So for quite a while now the world ‘Angels’ describes as a choice between living in the closet or not living in the closet hasn’t existed.”

That, Kushner said, inevitably leads to a question about the continued relevance of “Angels in America,” which now plays less like a commentary on current events than as a period piece.

“That’s the fate of all plays with a political dimension,” he said. “Hopefully, the play is what helped change things. I think the answer is that ‘Angels’ still works, even for kids who didn’t have to grow up in the closet as deeply as kids from my generation had to.”

Kushner pointed to a 19th century play, Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll House,” which in its day was a controversial commentary on conventional middle-class marriage. It continues to be produced today as a classic progressive commentary on sexism.

“The horrendous situation Ibsen is describing no longer exists, and yet the play is still a work of great genius and a masterpiece,” he said.

The public perception of AIDS has changed significantly since the early 1990s, Kushner added.

“The AIDS epidemic is no longer remotely what it was,” he said. “It’s no longer concentrated in the gay community as it once was. Once again, it’s sort of become invisible, as it was back in the ’80s when people didn’t want to deal with it, but for different reasons having to do with personal privilege.…

“The play is also about the political plague of Reaganism, and unfortunately the political plague of Reaganism is still with us.”

The version of “Angels” at the Rep is the most recent revision of the piece — particularly the second play, “Perestroika” — which Kushner prepared for the 2010 off-Broadway revival by Signature Theatre.

“Right now it feels like for the first time that ‘Perestroika’ is finished as a play,” Kushner said. “It’s the third published revision … and I haven’t been deeply involved in a production of the play for many, many years. It’s possible that when I get involved again there are other things I might change.”

In 1994, Kushner announced that he was working on a play that would be as epic and theatrically imaginative as “Angels in America.”

The new piece he described was based on the true story of Henry “Box” Brown, a Virginia slave who had himself mailed in a wooden crate to abolitionists in Philadelphia. He became a celebrity on the speakers circuit and eventually moved to England, where he formed a theatrical troupe and embarked on a show-business career.

Kushner wrote an early version of the piece when he was a resident playwright at Juilliard and also working on “Angels,” but there has yet to be a professional production. In 2010, graduate theater students at New York University staged a 10-performance run based on an errant copy of the play they obtained; Kushner mistakenly believed he had withdrawn all versions of the piece, but apparently one fell through the cracks.

“I never went back to it and always meant to,” he said.

He saw the version staged by the students and decided he needed to finish it.

“I was pleased with it,” he said. “I started working on it, and I wrote a couple of hundred pages of dialogue and then something else came along. I’ve got to get back to it. I’m a very slow writer, which is a problem. I take a very long time. I just hope I live a very long time so I can finish some of these things.”

Kushner said he’s working on a screenplay about Congresswoman Barbara Jordan for actress Viola Davis and on a musical with Tesori, his collaborator on “Caroline, or Change.” He just turned in the third draft of a screenplay based on David Kertzer’s nonfiction book “The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara.” Spielberg will direct the historical drama, the pair’s third collaboration.

“I guess he likes working with me,” Kushner said. “He’s a great guy and he’s a true collaborator. He’s the boss and it’s his film but … I’m on the set the whole time. He insists on that and we really enjoy talking about things and thinking things through while the film is being made.

“He’s obviously somebody with definite, clear opinions and a great command of his medium, but he’s open in a really beautiful way to other people’s ideas, and he’s excited by being challenged and questioned and interrogated. And he likes thinking.”

He has also learned a lot from Spielberg about the importance of plot, something playwrights are not necessarily good at.

“Watching him figure out how to tell a story has been one of the great joys of my artistic life — I’ve learned a lot about telling stories and how to tell a story from working with him,” Kushner said. “I think he’s a very serious filmmaker, and he’s got a narrative imagination comparable to Dickens.”

Kushner also is developing a series for HBO but couldn’t say much about it, other than that it’s set in contemporary New York. He said there’s no question that cable television has opened up more creative possibilities for dramatic writers than either stage or film.

“When you do a series, you’ve always had the ability to some extent to write an epic story, mostly because a series had to be something that could run as long as ‘Gunsmoke,’ and it had to go on forever,” he said. “But since David Chase and ‘The Sopranos’ transformed that, it was possible to work on a story that had a beginning, middle and end.… Now binge-watching is the thing, and everybody wants a miniseries, which for someone like me is great.”

What certain writers, producers and directors have achieved in recent years with series such as “The Sopranos,” “Breaking Bad” and “The Wire” has redefined the dramatic potential of television, Kushner said.

“I think that’s just thrilling. It changes everything.… It’s certainly an era where some of the greatest works of art in this period in the dramatic form are happening on television. It’s mind-boggling.”

This story was originally published March 7, 2015 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Tony Kushner: Master of stage and film turns his eye to TV."