KUSHNER, TONY

KUSHNER, TONY (1956– ), U.S. playwright. Born in New York City, Kushner grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where his father inherited the family lumber business. He attended Columbia University, where he earned a degree in medieval studies, and New York University, where he completed a master of fine arts degree in 1984. His first plays, starting with The Age of Assassins (1982), Yes, Yes, No, No (1985), and A Bright Room Called Day (1987), about Hitler's rise and contemporary America, attracted little notice. But in 1991 and 1992, his Angels in America, a two-part, seven-hour drama about life in the age of AIDS, burst upon the theatrical scene and became one of the most widely admired works of the late 20th century. The play mingles the political, personal, and universal in its treatment of such apparently disparate elements as homosexual and traditional relationships, Mormonism, Roy M. Cohn, Ethel Rosenberg, disease, love, and death. The play follows the lives of two couples and their friends, relatives, and visionary visitors as they struggle to come to terms with the realities of the late 20th century. One character, Prior   Walter, has AIDS. Unable to cope, his lover, Louis, leaves him and begins an affair with Joe, a Mormon lawyer who is about to leave his wife. Abandoned and dying, Prior begins to have visions of an angel. At the same time, Joe is drawn into the orbit of Cohn, an unscrupulous lawyer and political operator who is himself dying of AIDS. Kushner was hailed as a major talent, intelligent, witty, and humane. Angels in America won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, the Tony award for best play, best actor, and best direction, among other honors. A television miniseries version, directed by mike nichols in 2003 and starring Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and Emma Thompson, swept the national television awards, the Emmys, winning 11 prizes. In 1998 London's National Theater selected Angels in America as one of the 10 best plays of the 20th century. Overall, Kushner intends his plays to be part of a greater political movement. His work is concerned with moral responsibility during politically repressive times, and he brought the lofty into the approachable by creating everyday characters who collide both comically and tragically on stage. Kushner's other works include Slavs\! (1995) and Home-body/Kabul, a play about Afghanistan that opened shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. He also wrote adaptations of Corneille's The Illusion, S.Y. Ansky's The Dybbuk, and Brecht's The Person of Sezuan. Caroline or Change, a musical he wrote with the composer Jeanine Tesori, had its debut in 2004. He also wrote an original screenplay for a 2005 film directed by steven spielberg that chronicles the events of the 1972 Munich Olympics, in which 11 members of the Israeli team were murdered, and the plan by the secret Mossad squad to track down and kill the assassins. His books include Brundibar (2003), a book for children with illustrations by Maurice sendak , and Wrestling With Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict (2003), co-edited with Alisa Solomon. Among his honors were an Arts Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Spirit of Justice Award from the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, and a Cultural Achievement Award from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. (Stewart Kampel (2nd ed.)