the perfectionist: an interview with playwright tony kushner

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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