Canonizing Kushner

+ See the Guthrie’s listings of Tony Kushner events + Listen to Mpls.St.Paul Magazine’s Arts & Entertainment Editor Tad Simons interview Tony Kushner.

To hear Tony Kushner tell it, the life of an Emmy-Obie-Tony-Pulitzer-winning playwright is not all dinner parties and award ceremonies. There are photo shoots to endure, speeches to deliver, interviews to tolerate, and any number of other distractions from the solitary slog of writing. There is also the matter of making enough money to live, which even a playwright of Kushner’s stature has difficulty managing.

“People have insane fantasies about how much money I make,” Kushner tells me over dinner at Beppe, an Italian restaurant in New York’s Greenwich Village. It’s the evening before he will accept the first-ever Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, an honor that comes with a $200,000 check, the largest award ever given to an American playwright. “I’m not complaining,” he says, knowing full well that he is the envy of every playwright in the land. “But in the course of my professional life I’ve only had one hit play. A play , mind you, not a musical. It’s not Wicked .”

That play, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes , won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993, ran for 367 performances on Broadway, toured nationally, and was subsequently adapted for an HBO mini-series. An epic seven hours long, Angels in America is considered one of the most significant dramatic achievements of the 20th century, a play that grappled fearlessly with issues of gay rights and AIDS and became an iconic rallying cry for the entire gay rights movement.

Photo by Steve Henke

Since then Kushner has written several other plays as well as the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s film Munich, about the 1972 Olympic hostage crisis. He’s also been working on a movie script for Spielberg about Abraham Lincoln, but Kushner swears his heart is still in the theater. Which is good, because Guthrie artistic director Joe Dowling is making a bold bet on Kushner. Starting this month, Dowling turns over the entire Guthrie—including all three of its theaters—to Kushner’s work for a full 10 weeks.

The Guthrie’s Kushnerthon includes three different productions—the Tony–winning Caroline, or Change , the world premiere of a new Guthrie–commissioned play called (take a breath) The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures , and a program of short plays dubbed “tiny Kushner.” Twin Citians can also attend seminars, lectures, discussions, and film screenings of all things Kushner; a 24-hour public reading of Kushner’s entire body of work; guest lectures by such luminaries as The New York Times columnist and former theater critic Frank Rich; and an address by Kushner himself, who says he is flattered by the attention but, self-deprecating mensch that he is, concedes that it’s all “a bit much.”