Tony Kushner Talks New Broadway Project, ANGELS IN AMERICA, and More

Playwright Tony Kushner has made his mark on the theatre world with hits like CAROLINE OR CHANGE, LINCOLN, and his most famous piece and the one which many theatre fans consider his best, ANGELS IN AMERICA. However, he did not see the latter as his favorite at the time.

"I don't think it was so much of a passion project. It was a play-my second professional play [after A Bright Room Called Day], and I really approached it like that, he told OUT.

"I was commissioned by the Eureka Theatre to do a play for them, and when I started working on it, I was in my early thirties. But by the time I had finished the first part, Millennium Approaches, I began to get the sense that there was something about this play that had not been true about [Bright Room]."

The success of the show began and quickly took off like a spiral.

"The minute I sent copies of the first draft to people, there was an immediate excitement about it. New York Theater Workshop gave me space for the first reading of it, and we did a workshop production of it around 1989 in LA. A couple of months later, the National Theatre in London called and said that they wanted to do the play.

"I had only barely begun work on part two, Perestroika. By the time the first production of part one opened in San Francisco, it was already running in London, and Ian McKellen talked about it on the Tony Awards, and Frank Rich wrote a rave review of it in the Times. And he hated my first play. So this kind of crazy thing started. "

He also said that the 2005 film MUNICH, for which he penned the screenplay, was a huge step, a he was admittedly nervous.

"I did the first draft of Munich, and I wouldn't let him pay me for it. I wanted to do it on spec, because if I know that if there's some huge check in my bank account that I have to somehow earn, it would frighten me and I wouldn't be able to write a word. I wanted to be able to fail because I'd never written a [theatrical] screenplay."

He describes is experience with LINCOLN similarly, saying, "When I finally worked on Lincoln, I think the whole time I was writing it I was like, He's never going to film this. This is some weird exercise in I-don't-know-what and he'll say, 'Thank you very much.' And that will be that."

At the moment, Kushner is working on a mystery project for Broadway, which he describes as a "sort of famous German-language play," which "may be for a big star," but his lips are sealed on the details. He is also writing the screenplay for another Spielberg movie, based on David Kertzer's book, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara.

With all of his works, he is not focused on getting more fame, "If something else hits big, great, but that's never my job. The minute I start to think, Oh, this is going to be big, or, This doesn't feel big; why am I doing this, I'm finished as a writer."

Photo credit: Jennifer Broski