Tony Kushner, Radical Pragmatist

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.

Mother Jones: It's been a long road
for Angels in America to finally make it to the TV screen. Wasn't Robert Altman
going to direct a film version at one point?

Tony Kushner: Yes -- I think Altman is
a major American artist, and he was one of the first people I wanted to work with.
I sent him the play and he was immediately interested. For about a year and a half
I worked with him, wrote a screenplay. At that time it was supposed to be a theatrical
release, but studio executives had concerns -- about the material, about the
budget, about the length -- and it fell apart. At one point, even after Altman
had left the project, I tried to collapse Angels into one three-hour movie and found
that it was impossible. It just literally has too much plot.

MJ: So you're pleased it's ending up on
the small screen?

TK: I've felt for a long time that TV was
the right home. I'm kind of a TV junkie, and I felt much less intimidated
writing for the smaller-size picture. There's something about TV that's much more
like theater. The picture quality is not so great, and so you don't get these epic
visual spectaculars like Lord of the Rings. Also, just in terms of the kind of arguments
you can make, it's primarily a dialectical medium, alternating between two cameras.
It's limited -- but in an interesting way.

MJ: The HBO production is being grouped
with other shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy in this new category of gay
TV. How do you feel about that?

TK: As a gay man, I'm enormously interested
in the phenomenon. Gay TV has been immensely important in transforming American
culture in a more gay-positive direction. Roseanne and Madonna, in their respective
domains, are so important in their liberation of sexual minoritarians. A show like
Will & Grace, especially in the first few seasons, was pretty transgressive
in its treatment of the body -- pretty kinky and interesting. And Queer Eye is
fascinating. It has a pinch-me-I'm-dreaming quality. It's very bourgeois,
of course, and much more about the liberation of the consumer than the liberation
of the democratic citizen. Interestingly, I think that Angels will feel tame
in some ways. I don't write sexy. It's not remotely as hot as some of the things
you'll see on normal cable.

MJ: Since 9/11, another of your plays, Homebody/Kabul,
has gotten even more attention than Angels in America. Is it true that you
have been rewriting that play since it was first staged?

TK: I have been working on it, yes, but
not for political reasons. It's the first real family drama I wrote: As much as
it's about Afghanistan, there's a tortured family at one of the two hearts of the
work, and that's what I am endlessly tinkering with. As for its relationship to
September 11, I haven't changed anything about the political context. It's
set in 1998, so nothing needed to be changed.

MJ: Save Your Democratic Citizen Soul! is
targeted largely at young people. Are young Americans today insufficiently
prepared for political activism?

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.

On the other hand, there will always be a strong sense of injustice
among the young. When I wrote Homebody/Kabul, I thought it was time to think
more internationally in part because of the IMF and WTO protests, because of all
these kids protesting free-market capitalism.

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.

MJ: When was the last time that a belief
in the system paid off?

TK: It was the day they got that fucking
Ten Commandments monument out of Alabama. I found that thrilling. With all
the blows that the Bush administration has delivered to the separation of church
and state -- we have a president who can't stop talking about his relationship
to Jesus while he gleefully murders thousands of people -- it turns out that
we still kind of get it.

MJ: Your new play, Caroline or Change, looks
back on the Civil Rights era through the prism of 1960s Louisiana --

TK: Caroline illustrates one of the ultimate
cases in which American democracy achieved something great. I don't see how anyone
can read that history and then turn their back on the system -- how anyone can
think it's not important who our justices are, who the president is, who's in Congress.

These things, these ideas, these decisions, these elections really
do transform people's lives. We're seeing it now, every day: For gay people, the
overturning of the sodomy laws is immensely significant. It's why I think
politics is so extraordinary.

MJ: What about the Democratic Party? Can
it effectively oppose Bush?

TK: I have said this before, and I'll say
it again: Anyone that the Democrats run against Bush, even the appalling Joe Lieberman,
should be a candidate around whom every progressive person in the United States
who cares about the country's future and the future of the world rallies. Money
should be thrown at that candidate. And if Ralph Nader runs -- if the Green
Party makes the terrible mistake of running a presidential candidate -- don't
give him your vote. Listen, here's the thing about politics: It's not an expression
of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some
utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this.

The GOP has developed a genius for falling into lockstep. They
didn't have it with Nixon, but they have it now. They line up behind their candidate,
grit their teeth, and help him win, no matter who he is.

MJ: You're saying progressives are undone
by their own idealism?

TK: The system isn't about ideals. The country
doesn't elect great leaders. It elects fucked-up people who for reasons of ego want
to run the world. Then the citizenry makes them become great. FDR was a plutocrat.
In a certain sense he wasn't so different from George W. Bush, and he could have
easily been Herbert Hoover, Part II. But he was a smart man, and the working class
of America told him that he had to be the person who saved this country. It happened
with Lyndon Johnson, too, and it could have happened with Bill Clinton, but we were
so relieved after 12 years of Reagan and Bush that we sat back and carped.

In a certain sense, Bush was right when he called the anti-war
demonstrations a "focus group." We went out on the street and told him that we didn't
like the war. But that was all we did: We expressed an opinion. There was no one
in Congress to listen to us because we were clear about why they couldn't listen.
Hillary Clinton was too compromised, or Chuck Schumer -- and God knows they are.
But if people don't pressure them to do better, we're lost.

MJ: Is there a tension between the more
analytic, complaint-oriented side of your personality, of your work -- it's
everywhere in your plays -- and this more pragmatic view of politics?

TK: I think what one has to do is to ask
oneself, "Do you want to have agency in your own time?" If you really believe that
it's your place to leave the world a better place than it was when you arrived,
then how do you get the power? In this country, the most powerful country on earth,
you get it by voting the right people into power. There are means of getting the
power out of the hands of the very rich and the very wicked. It still flabbergasts
me that people didn't see this during the last presidential election. We had had
12 years of Reagan and Bush to prepare us for this outcome. It couldn't have
been clearer who we were dealing with. George W. Bush was -- is -- a little
robot programmed by his daddy to punish Saddam Hussein and get as much money for
the petrochemical bandits. It's absolutely jaw-dropping that Democrats saw
that and decided instead that they wanted to send a message to their own party that
they weren't happy with it for some relatively minor offense. Why didn't we turn
out in vast numbers for Gore? Why did we vote for Ralph Nader or not at all?
We would absolutely not be in Iraq today if we had a Democratic president in the
White House, and I don't need to know any more than that.