American playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner (born 1956) places personal relationships within political, historical, and imaginative worlds. He was born in New York and grew up in Louisiana, and graduated from Columbia College in 1978. Columbia’s historical profile identifies Angels in America, Slavs!, Homebody/Kabul, and Caroline, or Change among his works.
Major works
You can read Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes through its two parts: it consists of Millennium Approaches and Perestroika. The official 1993 Pulitzer record names Millennium Approaches as the winning work. The National Endowment for the Arts describes the play’s combination of relationships, identity, and the AIDS epidemic in 1980s New York. Keep the dramatic setting distinct from production and prize dates.
You can hear the development history in a 2013 NEA interview, where Kushner describes the play’s commission through the Eureka Theatre, working with Oskar Eustis, and an NEA grant connected to writing for a standing company of actors. His account makes collaboration and development part of the work’s history. It should not be converted into a claim that the finished script appeared fully formed or that one production settles every later interpretation.
You can also read his introduction in New Directions’ centennial edition of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. The connection is through the published edition; it does not establish that Williams personally taught Kushner.
For your reading and rehearsal, consider these interpretations alongside the complete play.
Thinking is part of the dramatic action
How do you act a character who is thinking on a large scale? You can locate the immediate person who needs to be persuaded, resisted or held close. In Kushner, a political or historical argument can coexist with the speaker's need for love, protection or permission. Prepare the ideas well enough to hear their distinctions, then investigate why this particular listener makes the argument necessary now.
Angels in America also asks you to cross theatrical scales. You encounter intimate relationships within a world that makes room for fantastic events and openly theatrical changes. You can keep your need specific when the form becomes extraordinary. An event need not resemble everyday life to have practical consequences for the person who receives it. Ask what the event permits, demands or makes impossible, and what you do in response.
The work across stage and screen offers a further comparison. Kushner wrote the screenplay for HBO's 2003 adaptation of Angels in America. The NEA account identifies that adaptation alongside the stage work. You can compare how an encounter is carried by a continuous theatrical space and how it is organized for the camera. Identify the version you are studying, and notice what the audience is allowed to see at a particular instant. The words, physical environment and point of view may distribute information differently. Your preparation remains grounded in the actual script, while your performance responds to the form in which the audience receives it.
Rehearsal questions
Try these independent study prompts with your chosen play.
Choose an argument from a complete script. For each speaker, separate three things: the position being defended, the change wanted from the listener, and the personal consequence of failing. You may understand an idea intellectually while still needing to discover why this person needs to say it to this listener now.
Track the partner’s actual responses. Where does explanation become persuasion, provocation, evasion, reassurance, or an appeal? Test whether attending to those changes makes a long passage more playable. The object is not to attach a new action word to every sentence, but to notice where a new attempt becomes necessary.
For a scene that changes theatrical register, list what the script specifies and what remains a production choice. Explore how the character responds to the event within the play’s world. When a fantastic event occurs, you can stay specific and keep the immediate relationship alive.
Research the historical references that affect a scene’s stakes. Keep that research in a working note and use it to sharpen the encounter. Do not assume every audience member needs a miniature lecture delivered through the performance. An ensemble can understand a reference fully while allowing the scene’s conflict to carry it.
Interpreting the work
When you read political drama, allow its characters’ arguments to disagree with one another. A character’s speech should not automatically be labeled the playwright’s settled opinion. Likewise, an interview about one work supplies context; it cannot settle the meaning of every later production or revision.
Related reading
Objective, tactic, and beat for changing attempts within an argument; craft for translating research into playable choices.
Source for further study: The National Endowment for the Arts on Angels in America.