the perfectionist: an interview with playwright tony kushner

The Perfectionist:
AN INTERVIEW WITH PLAYWRIGHT
TONY KUSHNER
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Tony Kushner probably needs no introduction. On a muggy afternoon in June,
2008, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright sat down with a Contemplate editor in his
small, well-furnished office overlooking Manhattan’s Union Square. Kushner’s plays express
his politics, and his politics are firmly rooted in the Jewish progressive tradition, so it made
sense to begin the interview with Kushner’s Jewish upbringing in Louisiana. From there,
the conversation roamed between politics and theatre, Israel and the U.S., Brecht and Philip
Roth. A question about Judaism led to a definition so concise it would make Hillel proud.
Kushner also mused on whether age—he was about to turn 52—had tempered his radicalism.
Excerpts from the 90-minute interview follow.
Contemplate: There’s a way in which one becomes
a Jew-by-osmosis living in New York City. But you’re
a New York Jew by way of Louisiana, where you were
raised in a progressive, non-religious Jewish family.
Where did you absorb so much Jewishness?
Tony Kushner: Well, I obviously absorbed a certain
amount as a child. My parents were not religious
people; my mother had really nothing much more
than an emotional/sentimental attachment to
Judaism. I think that my sense of the importance of
being Jewish was sharpened by the fact that I grew up
as part of a very small minority within an entirely
Christian community. It would have been possibly a
different thing had I grown up on the Upper West
Side of Manhattan.
You seem to articulate your Jewishness in two
ways—through your activism, but also through a
deep, almost omnivorous interest in Jewish people,
history, and issues.
I’m not sure what to say, except…Jews are very inter-
esting. I mean, I don’t know how you justify it. I call
myself an agnostic—and I think that’s a pretty good
description of what I am. In terms of theology…I’m
probably kidding myself.
But it’s an interesting thing—there’s a level of
comfort, a sense of belonging, that is only touched on
in the company of other Jews. I’m speaking personally
now, but I think this is something that a lot of Jews
share. For secular Jews in the United States, especially,
there may be a need, a hunger, that you’re not even
particularly aware exists until you find yourself in the
company of a lot of other Jews.
That sounds almost Jungian. Do you believe in a
Jewish consciousness—or unconscious?
People carry history within themselves, so if you want
to call that a collective unconscious, you can do that;
it’s a little mystical to me, I think it’s got more
material sources. You’re the receiver of a history.
And you carry that within you, and transform it
within yourself.

I know that you’re the type of Jew who cherishes stuff. It’s not that I don’t take that stuff seriously. It’s
certain Jewish traditions that comport with your
values, and jettisons other traditions. Which tra-
just that that’s the stuff I’m most uncertain about.
ditions do you keep? Which haven’t you kept? You’ve embraced the label “Jewish writer,” when
There are traditions, like homophobia and misog- as far as I can tell, what Jewish writers most have in
yny, that I categorically reject. There are traditional common is a disdain for the label “Jewish writer.”
attitudes about, for instance, in-
I don’t think all Jewish writers.
termarriage, that I reject. But I
Would Malamud have bristled?
don’t jettison any tradition, in
the sense that I’m intrigued by
all of them. I, personally, am
not an observant Jew. I’m not
frum; I’m not observant; I don’t
keep kosher. Every once in a
while I think there would be
something sort of nice about observing
the Sabbath, but it just
has never worked out, and I
guess I never felt a strong
Did Bellow? I don’t know.
Bellow did, I think; likewise
Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick.
Oh, really? God bless her.
I don’t know; it doesn’t make
sense to me. I see it as so
essential to your own survival
as a human being and to
your own internal coherence.
Maybe to somebody like Cyn-
enough pull. And I have diffithia,
or Roth, to be thought of
culty in shul, because I sort of
as a Jewish writer, there was a
believe, and sort of don’t be-
fear that you would be ghetlieve.
Again, I think it has more
toized as a kind of novelty act,
to do with community than it has to do with God, and real writers, real American writers, were not Jews
but maybe those two things are not as separate as I’m (except, of course, for all the important American
making them out to be.
writers of the 20
So what was Harold Bloom talking about when
he branded you a “theological” writer?
I think Harold’s idea is that “Angels in America” is
primarily of interest as a theological text, that it’s a
form of Gnosticism, that the notion of the abdication
of God and the vanishing of God is consonant
with Gnostic theology. And that my real calling is as
a theological writer, and not as a political writer. He
thinks that the good stuff in “Angels” is the spiritual
th I am a
Jewish writer,
I am a gay writer,
and I am an
American writer.
century, to the point where John
Updike actually has to pretend to be a Jew—with
Bech.) But I am a Jewish writer, and I am a gay writer,
and I am an American writer, and I don’t see any
point in trying to argue about that. Maybe if I was a
better writer than I am then I would think I’ve transcended
all of these things, but if Tolstoy didn’t
transcend being Russian, and Shakespeare didn’t
transcend being English, fair bet that neither I nor
any of the people we’ve mentioned have transcended
our American-ness, or our Jewishness.
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But in calling yourself a Jewish writer, aren’t you
also implying that Jewishness informs your art?
You’ve even referred to “Angels in America”—your
masterwork—as a Jewish play.
I think you could trace certain themes or aspects that
owe something to Jewish intellectual and dramatic
traditions and gay traditions. Angels is explicitly [Jewish]—I
didn’t intend it to be when I first started
writing it, it just sort of came out that way. There’s a
very powerful spine of the play that is this sort of
tracking the Jewish characters. But I also think that a
play like Homebody/Kabul, or the play that I’m working
on right now—which has no Jews in it—are
Jewish plays. Homebody/Kabul also has no gay people
in it, but I consider it to be, in a certain sense, a “gay”
play, in the sense that it’s written by a gay Jew and an
American gay Jew.
You seldom compartmentalize your art and your
identity-based politics.
I’ve really come to feel that any categorization like
political, spiritual—that these things are all so murky.
There is some level on which these are simply
different perspectives from which to view the same
problem. And the problem is never viewable if you
refuse access entirely to any one of the numerous
frameworks, any one of the numerous discourses.
If you try and understand politics and you have no
understanding of psychology, or for that matter spirituality,
or philosophy, or history, you’re going to be a
[expletive] politician. If you try to write about people,
and pay no attention to what’s happening in the
world around them—or try and write about God…
I mean, go look at Isaiah. The bible is political. The
prophets are full of it: Don’t [expletive] over the poor.
Don’t be a greedy pig. Make sure that you behave in
the world in a decent fashion. In fact, it’s perfectly le-
gitimate to say that, in a certain sense, Judaism doesn’t
ask you to do anything other than that. Do those
things, and the rest of it—whatever.
I read somewhere about your affection—I think
you described it almost in terms of kinship—for
the Yiddish playwright S. Ansky. As the story goes,
you adapted “The Dybbuk” after hearing a Yiddish
poem and being struck by the sonorousness of it.
Do you recall that moment? Was it really an ur-moment
in the gestation of the play?
Vanessa Redgrave did a benefit for Sarajevo, and she
had, among many other people, an old Yiddishspeaking
actress. It was incredible…I remember the
word “shtein” kept coming up. Possibly, she was going
through the names of both shtetls of Eastern Europe
and the names of the camps, and after each one she
would say shtein. It was stunningly beautiful. And it
did have a sound in Yiddish that I wasn’t…it was just
like when I listened to the Klezmatics for the first time
and heard that kind of very sexy, very lyrical sound—
a kind of lyrical and voluptuous sound that I wasn’t
accustomed to in the Yiddish that I took here, which
was mostly sayings and curses.
Yiddish you’d learned from your grandmother.
My grandmother, Sarah, and then my mother and her
sisters. I would pick up bits and pieces. You know,
I just did the introduction to Sholem Aleichem’s
novel, Wandering Stars, it’s a Yiddish theatre novel,
and it’s staggering the way it’s full of the most outrageous
curses. My favorite is “Go bake bagels in hell.”
There’s just an endless talent for invective. There’s a
great deal of rage caught up in it, which is one of the
things that’s really interesting.

But rage that’s sublimated into comically-tinted
idioms.
Beautifully and partially sublimated, because a lot of
it is left as it is, which gives it its power.
is never…I mean, unless everybody’s dead, it’s always
unstable. It’s always transforming. And in the unfixity
of things, there’s the possibility of transformation
into something else. Unless it’s “Endgame.” And even
“Endgame”—I mean, what could be bleaker than the
On a perhaps related note, your contempt for
President Bush is well known. But you’ve also, and
quite often, spoken about the need to avoid despair
about politics. To rally, in fact. Is there a
contradiction, then, between the citizen’s responsibility—to
remain hopeful—and the artist’s
responsibility—to tell the truth even in un-hopeful
times?
There’s this great line of W. H. Auden’s: “Sing of
human unsuccess/In a rapture of distress.” In fact, in
a way, art’s job is not to reassure you, and tell you “listen,
it’s all gonna be fine,
don’t worry,” but to say, Oh
my God, things couldn’t be
worse. The greatest political
play of the 20th ending of that completely perfect play? And yet, it’s
so astonishingly beautiful—one hundred million
times more alight and incandescent with light at the
end, even though it’s showing you the end of the
world, basically.
Changing subjects slightly, I know that you see
major issues—gay rights; social and economic
justice; secularism—as interwoven. How does the
last one—secularism—fit into this matrix? What’s
the role of secularism in a progressive politics?
century
is “Mother Courage,” and
not with Kattrin breaking
up the town, but with her
death, and her mother’s
grief, and then her mother
It’s the thing that makes
it possible. There’s no such
There’s no such thing thing as pluralist democracy
without secular pluralist
democracy. The minute re-
as pluralist democracy
ligion begins to establish
itself as an integral part of
without secular
the democratic equation,
the democratic equation
pluralist democracy.
ceases to be. I think that
alone. Now that is the sad-
would be true if everybody
dest image, or one of the
was Buddhist. The idea that
saddest images, in all of Western drama. And you you’re creating a space in which religious difference is
should be shattered by the end of the play. And then, tolerated is predicated on the idea that you’re creating
like any nightmare, the job of standing up and de- a space in which religion doesn’t exist. Which is the
ciding what you’re going to do with the nightmare thing that seems to be so challenging to people on the
you’ve had is up to you.
Right in this country at this point.
Also, the job of being an artist is to represent re- I feel that the things that I advocate—the pursuit
ality as fully as possible. I do believe that as long as of social and economic justice, and the pursuit of
there’s life, if you really represent the world fully, you’ll progress in a secular, pluralist, multicultural democ-
find an occasion for genuine hope. Because the world racy—contains within it the only hope that I can see.
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At a time when the political Right has so effectively
leveraged religion for its own ends, do you think
secularism should be similarly mobilized, as a
countervailing force?
As long as we’re not talking about branding. Secularism
is not atheism. Secularism is not the statement
that there is no God. Secularism is the banishing of
religious discourse in order to have the kind of discussion
leading to the kind of compromises necessary
to form a coherent democratic society. A society that
is self-governing, not governed by theots from above.
So it’s hard to organize around an abstraction. Unless
you’re Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr., unless you
have a genius for that sort of Moses-like leadership,
I don’t think you can plan a movement around something.
It’s a hope, rather than something that one can
work towards. And it’s always been the Achilles’ heel
of this thing—of democracy, of progress; of progress
through democracy—that it’s a contract of mutual
indifference, it’s a contract of mutual support. It relies
on the just consent of the governed. It’s only working
when it’s shaky; it’s only working when it’s frail.
The real organizing principle right now, the only
thing that’s really going to mobilize us against morons—it’s
even changing the Evangelicals right
now—is that the world is about to come to an end.
We’ve clearly reached some kind of new and completely
frightening apocalyptic threshold. And we’ve
never been in this place before.
You’re talking about nuclear disaster—or ecological
disaster?
Ecological. We’re really, really, really in trouble. As we
move along, the environmental stuff—it overshadows
everything. And not just for me, but for everyone.
The weather report has become the scariest thing; you
keep waiting for these dummies who are broadcasting
the weather to stop giggling about the fact that it’s 80
degrees in January in New York, and just start to
think: oh my god. There’s a great line in Susan Sontag’s
The Volcano Lover. She’s talking about boys
jumping into the Bay of Naples. There’s a volcano
spuming in the background, and she sticks in, in her
wonderful way, a modern narrative. Which is, of
course, that if you jump into the Bay of Naples now,
the poison water would strip the skin off your bones.
But in the 18th century, people could only think of nature
as being destroying, not of us having the power
to destroy nature. And we are now absolutely universally
recognizing that creation itself is going to be our
next victim. The big question is, are we going to be
able to assimilate that in order to make the changes
necessary to reverse that, in time?
There need to be many, many, many, many more
severe forms of regulation of industry, but also of
what you can and can’t drive, and what you can and
can’t own, in order to turn this thing around. But I
believe that that can be done within the context of
genuinely democratic society.
You’re 51 now. Has age tempered your radicalism?
I worry about that—I think that an absolute hazard
of getting old is that you start to get creaky and tired.
Certainly when I was in my twenties the idea of revolution,
which was largely inchoate, was enormously
exciting. I discovered in the course of my late twenties,
early thirties, a really deep admiration for
political movements that have operated within democratic
structures and produced radical change. But,
yeah, I’m sorry to say that over the years—and you’d
have to be kind of an eggplant for this not to happen—that
I’ve changed. I mean, unless you’re going
to be one of those people who walks around saying
that the Great Leap Forward never happened—it was

a lie!—and nothing bad ever happened under Mao,
nothing bad ever happened under Stalin. You can’t say
those things anymore; we know too much.
I don’t think you have to turn into Martin Amis or
Chris Hitchens. You don’t need to turn into an idiot—
or a Thatcherite. But you certainly want to learn
something from history.
That’s the breakdown?
Almost always. Gay people, too. It’s 75% Democrat,
25% Republican.
Couldn’t that just be Andrew Sullivan—the gay
conservative pundit—voting a lot of times?
Andrew Sullivan, I think, voted for Kerry. He’ll certainly—I’m
pretty sure—vote for Obama this time.
You’ve said that see yourself firmly within the tradi- Suddenly, the scales fell from his eyes! Who knew Bush
tion of leftist Jewish progressivism. Would you assess was a terrible person! All those executions in Texas
the state of that tradition today? Could you ever imagine
a recrudescence of the heyday of Jewish socialism?
didn’t tell us anything!
I mean, I don’t think we should wonder about whether It’s been around four years since you wrote
or not we’re going to get back to anything like that. I “Munich,” a film that was criticized for being both
mean who knows, and in a certain sense, who cares. too hard on the Israelis and insufficiently sympa-
It’s like, that was then, and this is now. Jewish life is imthetic to the Palestinians. So let me ask you, finally,
proving, the massive success of Jews in the United about the Middle East.
States as American citizens—we’re so much more dis- The Sharon/Bush approach to the Middle East got
persed and diverse a community now, so we’re not a fair experiment, and it didn’t result in anything
going to have the kind of collective force that we had particularly good. So maybe it’s time to go back to
in the 20s. But I’d like to believe—I think it’s the case— nation-building and peace talks—all that stuff that we
that Jewish progressivism is
were so quick to sneer at
alive and well, that Jewish pro-
during the Clinton era. You
gressivism is on its way back, I’d like to believe that now look at the situation with
that Jewish neoconservatism
Israel and the Palestinians, and
has suffered the same sort of Jewish progressivism even the most right wing
black eyes that neoconservatism
people—well, the most right
in general has suffered. I think is alive and well.
wing people are loony tunes.
that Wolfowitz or Joe Lieber-
But anybody who’s rational
man—I’ve been assuming that
has got to look at this and go,
these people have become somewhat distasteful to the ‘ok, this has gotten very, very, very not black and white,
reliable 75% of Jews who have for a long time now this has gotten very, very complicated, and it’s going
been on the progressive side of things. I’d get very to take a lot of hard thinking to sort of what the hell
worried if, in the next election, more than 25%—the this means.”And that’s always a good moment for pro-
25% that usually votes Republican—voted Republican. gressive people.
TONY KUSHNER is among the giants of 20th century theatre. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his epic drama, “Angels in America,” and his socially-
and historically-conscious plays—including “Homebody/Kabul” and “Caroline, or Change”—have won awards and informed the
sensibilities of a generation of playwrights and theatergoers. Grateful appreciation for this interview is extended by the editors of Contemplate.
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