Tony Kushner - Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness

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Table of Contents

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

ANGELS IN AMERICA, PART ONE:
MILLENNIUM APPROACHES

ANGELS IN AMERICA, PART TWO:
PERESTROIKA

A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY

THE ILLUSION

freely adapted from Pierre Corneille

This book is dedicated to my mother,
Sylvia Deutscher Kushner.

When beyond noise of logic I shall know
And in that knowledge swear my knowledge bound
In all things constant, never more to show
Its head in any transience it has found:
When pride of knowledge, frames of government,
The wrath of justice gagged and greed in power,
Sure good, and certain ill, and high minds bent
On destiny sink deathward as this hour:
When deep beyond surmise the driven shade
Of this our earth and mind my mind confirms,
Essence and fact of all things that are made,
Nature in love in death are shown the terms:
When, through this lens, Ive seen all things in one,
Then, nor before, I truly have begun.

JAMES AGEE
Sonnets

PREFACE

Im a playwright, not an essayist or a poet or a preacher. But on various occasions, since Angels in America, Ive either been called on or been inspired to try forms other than plays. Perhaps the works gathered here are simply dramatic monologues masquerading as poems or essays; perhaps they only work if you read them aloud, or better yet, have them read aloud by talented actors. Perhaps the whole collection is really a long, experimental play, with Slavs! as a narrative interlude. Try declaiming the essays to an audience; you will feel like you are being bar or bas mitzvahed.

I notice that I catalogue a lot, I make lists of things, mostly of bad things. In Sarah Schulmans beautiful new novel, Rat Bohemia, a character says, There is not enough anger for everything that makes me angry. As Judaism teaches, you have to be worried about everything evil, all at once, all the time. Thats what God expects of you. Making lists is one way of doing that, of not excluding, not forgetting.

I prefer to pontificate from behind my characters and the fictions through which they romp and argue. But its probably a healthy thing, revealing the man behind the curtain. Behind that man, of course, there is another curtain, and another man behind that, and so on. I believe that the playwright should be a kind of public intellectual, even if only a crackpot public intellectual: someone who asks her or his thoughts to get up before crowds, on platforms, and entertain, challenge, instruct, annoy, provoke, appall. Im amused and horrified when I realize that, on occasion, Im being taken seriously. But of course being taken seriously is my ambition, semi-secretly-and-very-ambivalently held. I enjoy the tension between responsibility and frivolity; its where my best work comes from.

As is the case with practically everything I write, I am indebted to Kimberly Flynn, in innumerable exchanges with whom my ideas and my styles and my sense of the world at large are largely shaped. I explain more about my intellectual relationship with Kimberly in the essay With a Little Help from My Friends. More people have responded to this essay, which appeared in the New York Times, than any other Ive written, suggesting, perhaps, that the issues it addressesindebtedness and collaborationare of general concern. Thanks to the people who have told Kimberly they liked my work, and her part in it. (Please, everyone, stop calling her a muse.)

Thanks, also, to Joyce Ketay and Carl Mulert, my agents, to my sister Lesley, to my brother Eric, to my father, to my aunt Martha, to my whole supportive extended family and to a large number of friends; but in this book Im especially grateful to Mark Bronnenberg, Kathy Chalfant, Oskar Eustis, Deborah Glazer, Brian Kulick, Craig Lucas, Jim Magruder, Michael Mayer my girlfriend, Ellen McLaughlin my angel and fellow writer, Jim Nicola, Lisa Peterson, Michael Petshaft, Stephen Spinella, Tony Taccone, Tess Timoney, Rosemary Tichler and George C. Wolfe.

Terry Nemeth and the folks at TCG have been generous, encouraging and indulgent to a fault, but no fault Id ever care to name. I appreciate their work more than I can say.

SPECIFICALLY, I want to thank editors Will Blythe at Esquire, Allison Silver at the Los Angeles Times and Aric Press at Newsweek, all of whom were great to work with. Andrea Stevens at the New York Times has been a pleasure, a treasure, a wonderful editor, and supportive and encouraging throughout the past two years, and Im very grateful. Katrina vanden Heuvel, the late and much-missed Andrew Kopkind and JoAnn Wypijewski at the Nation have been colleagues, comrades and collaboratorsand I owe the title of the essay A Socialism of the Skin (Liberation, Honey!), as well as its final shape, to JoAnn.

Wendy Lessers suggestions and reading of this manuscript, and her erudition, friendship and encouragement, have been tremendously important. Everyone should rush out and subscribe to the Threepenny Review, the countrys best literary magazine.

ESSAYS

AMERICAN THINGS

Summer is the season for celebrating freedom, summer is the time when we can almost believe it is possible to be free. American education conditions us for this expectation: Schools out! The climate shift seductively whispers emancipation. Warmth opens up the body and envelops it. The body in summer is most easily at home in the world. This is true even when the summer is torrid. I have lived half my life in Louisiana and half in New York City. I know from torrid summers.

On my seventh birthday, midsummer 1963, my mother decorated my cake with sparklers shed saved from the Fourth of July. This, I thought, was extraordinary, fantastic, sparklers spitting and smoking, dangerous and beautiful atop my birthday cake. In one indelible, ecstatic instant my mother completed a circuit of identification for me, melding two iconographies, of self and of liberty: of birthday cake, delicious confectionery emblem of maternal enthusiasm about my existence, which enthusiasm I shared; and of the nighttime fireworks of pyro-romantic Americana, fireworks-liberty-light which slashed across the evening sky, light which thrilled the heart, light which exclaimed loudly in the thick summer air, light which occasionally tore off fingers and burned houses, the fiery fierce explosive risky light of Independence, of Freedom.

Stonewall, the festival day of lesbian and gay liberation, is followed closely by the Fourth of July; they are exactly one summer week apart. The contiguity of these two festivals of freedom is important, at least to me. Each adds piquancy and meaning to the other. In the years following my seventh birthday I had lost some of my enthusiasm for my own existence, as most queer kids growing up in a hostile world will do. Id certainly begun to realize how unenthusiastic others, even my parents, would be if they knew I was gay. Such joy in being alive as I can now lay claim to has been returned to me largely because of the successes of the political movement which began, more or less officially, twenty-five years ago on that June night in the Village. Ive learned how absolutely essential to life freedom is.

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