Mother Jones: Awesome article, the words of a genius Tony Kushner

[La_Serpiente]

The Pulitzer Prize-winning playright of Angels in America on queer TV and power politics in America.

Tony Kushner is the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, which airs as a two-part film -- directed by Mike Nichols and starring Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and Emma Thompson -- on HBO this December. The play, originally written in 1990, is a sweeping indictment of the Reagan era that follows the story of Prior, an AIDS sufferer caught between an ex-boyfriend and a married lover with a mentally disabled wife. The invented characters are counterweighted by a subplot that centers on Roy Cohn, the McCarthy-era lawyer and right-wing bulldog who died of AIDS in 1986.

Kushner's other plays include Homebody/Kabul, an eerily prescient play written pre-9/11 that links the modern worlds of London and New York to the fanatical politics of the Taliban, and the forthcoming Caroline or Change, a work set in Civil Rights-era Louisiana. He is also the author of the recently published call to arms, Save Your Democratic Citizen Soul! Rants, Screeds and Other Public Utterances for Midnight in the Republic, a book targeted at young activists.

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A chat with Tony Kushner

[Paschall]

1. In todays NY Times

Frank Rich reviews "Caroline, or Change":

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/07/arts/07RICH.html?pagewanted=print&position=

[Logansquare]

2. Kushner's comments on the destruction of an educated electorate

"TK: I think the country is undereducating its young. I think it's a deliberate, designed, malevolent project by the right to destroy public education. People are more easily manipulated when they don't have information. If you ensure that kids grow up without basic reading skills, math skills, and so forth, then you ensure that they can't act effectively....

There are a lot of politically active young people, but I feel that we've misled them. I have great admiration for the essayists and writers on the left, but the left decided at some point that government couldn't get it what it wanted. As a result, it's a movement of endless complaint and of a one-sided reading of American history, which misses the important point: Constitutional democracy has created astonishing and apparently irreversible social progress. All we're interested in is talking about when government doesn't work."