Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner is still my hero. Those of you who knew me when I was a wide-eyed, idealistic college student may also know that he became my hero then, and how. You may have even been in the Drama class with me where we read his Angels in America (it has since been made into a movie), or gone to see him speak at Annenberg Auditorium with me.

Mr. Kushner has made waves in several ways since. He wrote a fantastic play, Homebody/Kabul, which was just about finished on 9/11 - that's right, he wrote a play about Afghanistan and the Taliban mostly BEFORE 9/11. There's a great line in the postscript to that play, in which he endeavors to respond to all the folks who called his play "earily prescient." Well, there are two great lines in that postscript that I remember without having it in front of me. One is something along the lines of, "This play has been called eerily prescient so often, that my partner and I decided it should be my new drag name - Eera Lee Prescient." Hah. The other is something like shoot, if even I, a mere playwright, could figure out that shit was going to hit the proverbial fan in Afghanistan, how come our government didn't? What the hell were they doing about it??

Word, brother Tony. Word.

Anyway, that's all a bit of ancient history now, I guess, but I encourage all to check out his plays. I've just seen the film Munich, for which he cowrote the screenplay. It's a very different tone from his plays, which are generally political but also really funny. This movie was decidedly unfunny, which was appropriate to the subject matter. However, I could feel his influence very strongly in the script. He is a very humanistic writer; he writes dialogue so that you can tell what's going on in someone's head, so that you can feel their pain or fear or love or awe or whathaveyou. I would guess that he did a lot of writing for the main character, an extremely human young Israeli assassin. It was pretty incredible, very intense, and awfully sad. It did not come across to me as being Zionist or anti-Zionist or anything in between; just human, incredibly difficult and human.

Highly recommended!