TCG National Conference 2003

TONY KUSHNER
TCG National Conference, June 12, 2003

TONY KUSHNER: I sat down to write something to say to you this morning. I'm in rehearsal now in two different cities with two different, very different plays, both of which are requiring rewriting. It's not that I didn't have the time; there's always time. It's that when I write plays it's sort of like having a low-grade fever. It's sort of like being a cold front lodged against a warm front producing fog and drizzle and mildly inclement weather. I'm in a bad mood—not a towering rage, but a funk all day long, every day. And, you know, I just don't want to be here. I feel not presentable and deeply, deeply unwise and like no one you should ever listen to. You are theatre professionals, after all. You should all have better sense than to sit in a room and listen to a playwright in rehearsal. I am only here because Oskar Eustis, the smartest man in the American theatre, made me come by reminding me that I am no longer a young person whose job it is to take and take and take and feed and feed and feed, but rather something like a junior elder of the tribe, a person with responsibility to the profession, having, for the last 20 years, made a living in the profession. I've been a professional theatre artist for 19 years. Next year will mark my second decade making my living as a playwright in the American theatre. In other words: I am old. Not, I hope, as old as I will get, but certainly young no longer. So, now, every so often, Oskar told me, when called upon I should answer, so here I am with nothing to say.

Way back when I was a young theatre artist, I took great interest in what the American theatre was up to because I needed to believe that what I was doing—or trying to do—was better than what was being done. I needed to believe that I was needed. This meant that I needed to believe there was a place, a space, a gap not yet filled—an absence, a deficit perhaps, not even consciously noticed or remarked upon, but which would be noticed when I arrived and filled it. My arrival would be registered as a relief. Some fearsome chasm that nobody wanted to talk about before would now be bridged or explored and domesticated or at least mapped. Some ache would be assuaged. Some register would now be sung in the choir, the polyphony enriched, the general music expressing a new, richer completion because of the addition of my voice. This meant that I had to believe that I could hear something not complete in the general music, some deficiency, some cause for dissatisfaction. And, of course, that was easy. Most theatre is terrible. It's boring and ugly and bad. A lot of it is downright reprehensible, endorsing the worst in us, flattering our smugness and, worse, our calamitous complacency, permitting us self-pity over our powerlessness rather than arousing our disgust, reassuring us that the world isn't being destroyed because of widespread reactionary political mischief and misdirection and downright evil, when the world is, in fact, absolutely, incontrovertibly unmistakably being destroyed—the whole world, all life on earth, every living, breathing, water-drinking thing. It's unimaginable. And only the very, very wicked and the very, very stupid and the very, very frightened deny this and, of course, the wicked and the stupid and the frightened are to be found working in the American theatre. Why should the theatre be different from any other profession? Of course, those, for the most part, in our theatre who aren't wicked are incapable of acting on principle, good, but ineffectual. Those not stupid aren't smart enough, educated enough, deep-thinking enough, freethinking enough, honestly in pursuit of truth and meaning as opposed to tidiness. And those not paralyzed by fear, for the most part, are only capable of faltering movement. To say, as is only true, that all this means merely that the theatre is a human institution is an invitation to an acceptance of its deficiencies only if you are the sort of person who believes that people can't change. And if you are, you shouldn't be working in the theatre. You shouldn't be working as a teacher, either, or as a doctor or a nurse or a lawyer or a journalist or a business person because to believe that people can't change and that human institutions can't improve is to believe injustice, cupidity, mendacity and willful ignorance are intractable aspects of the human condition; is to be a person without hope. And there are such people and they spend their lives manufacturing ideologies expressed in their art, their prose, their political and personal practice, the chief purpose of which are never to explain life, but to limit it; never to broaden horizons and lift the sight or bring light, but to wage war against vision under the cover of darkness under which cover heinous crimes may be committed with impunity. If you are a person who believes that people can't change and the world can't change and life is not improvable—individual life and the life of the planet—well, it's clear you have a job waiting for you in the Bush administration.

I believed all this to be true 20 years ago and I believe it is still true. Theatre, like the country, needs to be changed, but after 20 years of work I realize that changing things is a lot harder than I assumed it would be in my youth and that progress is shockingly slow and uncertain. I have been chastened, painfully, by the realization, one through the work I've done, that much in me is deficient, much in me and my art that is indicted by the complaint I make about the world, the country, the theatre community, the art of the theatre as it is to be seen on our stages. It's very hard to write a good play. Almost always art fails. I come to feel respect for anyone who doesn't let this awful truth silence her. If I struggle to meet the challenge, or one of the challenges anyway, of middle age, of an unignorable transformation of the body and the spirit that is taking place in me day after worrisome day; if I struggle to remain awake, intransigent about recognizing the danger we face, recognizing our complicity in our own doom; if I battle within and without to rescue my knowledge of the awesome power of hope from the evil, soul-numbing nonsense spouted and shouted and hissed and whispered all day, every day, from every corner, by privilege frantically seeking to preserve itself; if I am still enraged by fellow citizens, fellow artists not struggling—my rage is tempered in my mid-forties by a sympathy born of experience, a sympathy that's sometimes a nuisance, but the absence of which would indicate that I had learned nothing in the past 20 years and people who don't learn don't change.

And maybe the theatre has, in the past 20 years, improved more, or at least backslid less, than the country and the world. The country is worse. There's never been a more appalling Congress, not a more compromised judiciary, nor an administration more reckless or irresponsible or cynical than the unscrupulous, oil plutocrats, imperialist adventurers and war criminals currently in quasi-legal occupancy of the White House. The world has never been in such dreadful shape. The Kyoto Accords are falling apart and nuclear weapons are proliferating again and tribalism is rampant and internationalism and global justice a fainter and fainter dream as multinational corporations ride free-market fetishization towards a polarized planet, full of obscene disparities and discrepancies in opportunity and wealth, hopelessness and a lethal desperation. And then there's the theatre. I don't know why it is that we haven't produced plays as great as our three great plays. It's been a long while and I think nothing we've produced compares to Streetcar, Salesman and, especially, Long Day's Journey Into Night. [applause] Why is that? Those plays can stand—you don't have to applaud that, it's just…cranky person up here. Why is this? Those plays can stand alongside other 20th-century greats: Godot and Mother Courage and maybe even the plays of Chekhov. But we've certainly produced a lot of really remarkable writing for the stage: Albee and Fornes and Guare and Mamet and Wilson. From O'Neill and Miller and Williams to Albee, Fornes, Guare, Mamet and Wilson is certainly a far less precipitous slide than, let's say, from Roosevelt or Truman or Kennedy or Johnson to George W. Bush. So the theatre is doing better, or less badly, than the country. And this past season alone, I saw Suzan-Lori Parks's Fucking A at the Public Theater in Michael Greif's production starring S. Epatha Merkenson. I saw John Patrick Shanley's Dirty Story. There's Oskar Eustis's production of Paula Vogel's Long Christmas Ride. There's Def Poetry Jam and Bob Falls's Long Day's Journey Into Night on Broadway. There's Ellen McGlaughlin's The Persians. I have read exciting new plays this season by Craig Lucas, Naomi Wallace, Kia Corthron and there are so many amazing young playwrights, like Renne Groff and Danny Goldfarb and Chris Shinn and Anne Washburn and Betty Shamieh. When Suzan-Lori Parks is writing and Kia Corthron and Renne Groff are writing, Miller and Williams and O'Neill should watch out. It's not over yet. When I was young, I could take unmitigated pleasure in my kvetching, to the extent that I ever took unmitigated pleasure in anything. (Is there, in fact, such a thing as unmitigated pleasure and, if there was, would it be any fun?) Even though I took pleasure in my kvetching, there was really remarkable stuff to see back then; there always was. There was the brilliant world of the truly great American experimentalists like LeCompte, Foreman, Breuer, Akalaitis, Wilson, Ludlum. I don't know whether there is a new generation to compare with these titans, but these movements have a season and the '60s prepared the way for the golden age in experimentation and the '70s witnessed it and, by the '80s, there was Reagan and Ed Koch and the real estate boom in New York that gobbled up all available theatre space. And, in spite of all this, many, many brilliant directors, uneven as directors always, always are and must be, but thrilling explorers and discoverers nonetheless and the unsung heroes, along with the administrative staffs of nonprofit theatres, of our country's theatrical health, such as it is. And there are so many exciting trained actors now, when they can take a break from cable and work on stage; an embarrassment of designers; all sorts of really exciting new composers for the stage—Jeanine Tesori, Michael John LaChiusa, Adam Guettel, Ricky Ian Gordon and there's Stephen Sondheim, who maybe really should be included with Miller, Williams and O'Neill.

Theatre is a colossal disappointment. It's nothing like what it could be, but there's always really, really good stuff. And we in this room should feel that this is an accomplishment. It has happened for all sorts of reasons, but, in part, good theatre always happens because there is enough cash, as well as strength, time and patience, all of which cash helps supply in this fallen world. We, or rather many of you, have inherited the beginnings of an American theatre and sustained it, expanded it, democratized it, made it ever so slightly pluralist and multicultural, as much as could be managed. Against the odds, against the darkest wishes of the worst people, the American theatre has not fallen silent, has not been destroyed, and a million, billion mazels truly for that from one who has been a beneficiary of your Herculean efforts. We should, of course, have most of our financial problems solved by an enormous arts budget on the federal level and there is much cause of grief and shame that we have allowed the NEA to be starved by the worst people, used as a beachhead for their assault on civilization, on rational governments, on economic justice. We have, it must be said, failed utterly to frame the fight for the NEA properly. We have failed to make common cause between ourselves and the many, many other groups under assault by the tax-cutting, states-rightist, antidemocratic, theocratic, larcenist plutocracy. We have failed to make it clear that what is at stake in the death by starvation of the NEA is something much, much more than the question, important as it is, of the survival and even growth of the arts in America, for there will always be artists and art. We have accepted the marketplace logic and scarcity-economy logic and ego-anarchist logic and grown timid and ashamed and fatally shortsighted—failed to make it clear that, by attacking the NEA, the Right attacks secular democracy, free expression and franchisement of minorities, attacks the role of the federal government as the principal guarantor of liberty and justice and a civilized standard of living. We have opted for survival, rather than fighting. This is a miserable failure. But the republic isn't dead yet and so the last chapter on arts funding, adequate federal arts funding, waits to be written—not by Bush and DeLay and Dennis Hastert and Bill Frist and Trent Lott. God forbid. It waits to be written by us.

As I have said, I have nothing to say this morning, and I thank you for your kind indulgence while I didn't say it. Probably the best of what I have say, the most useful, is said in my plays. All this I've said again and again in the past 20 years. It's only in plays that I find new things to say and that's why I love being a playwright and that's why I love the theatre. It shows us, again and again, that there is hope because there is always something new. As I said, I am happy to come here to talk among friends, so I am honored and happy to be invited to do so. I am always aware of our mutual interdependence, how much we all need each other, we theatre people, to make our mistakes together, to fail together, to suffer shame and joy together and, together, to move ahead.

OSKAR EUSTIS: So what are you working on?

KUSHNER: A cold. Right now I'm in rehearsal simultaneously—a workshop with George Wolfe and Jeanine Tesori for this musical I've written the words for, Caroline, or Change, at the Public, which will go into rehearsal in September. And—it's very odd to be saying this to you because you know the answer to this question—and I'm working, at the same time, which is really remarkably bad planning, on the new version of Homebody/Kabul at Steppenwolf with Frank Galati.

EUSTIS: Would you mind talking a little bit about Caroline. It's probably not as well known to any of us as Homebody.

KUSHNER: I actually wrote it originally as an opera libretto. I was commissioned to do it by San Francisco Opera. It's set in the deep South in the town that I grew up in, Lake Charles, La., and it involves the relationship—it's set in 1963—it involves the relationship between an African-American woman who works as a maid for a Jewish family in Lake Charles. Her name is Caroline and it's about her. I wrote it and brought it to George to look at because I wanted him to direct it. It was actually written for Bobby McFerrin who then decided that he didn't want to write an opera. So I got the rights back and went to Jeanine and asked her to do the music because I think she's really extraordinary and she's done an unbelievable job with the music. I think it's gorgeous. It's going to be starring Tonya Pinkins and a really amazing cast—Veanne Cox and great people. And so that's what it is.

EUSTIS: Tell a little more about the story. Would you mind sharing what happens? Plot?

KUSHNER: Well, I don't know…it's a very simple little story, I guess, in a way. It's about this woman who works as a maid, as I said. She has four kids. She's divorced. She makes $30 a week, so she lives in incredibly difficult circumstances, with one of her kids, the oldest one, is in Vietnam, in the army in Vietnam, but the other kids are at home still. They're very young. And she's a very unhappy person and feels very trapped and hopeless because of her economic circumstances. And the family that she works for, the mother of the family—there's a mother and a father and a little kid who's eight years old, a boy—and the mother has just died of cancer and the father has gone to New York and almost immediately married his wife's—his dead wife's—best friend and brought her down to Louisiana. The new wife is having a really hard time with the little boy, who hates her. And they're locked in this kind of power struggle. The little boy keeps leaving pocket change in his pockets and Caroline, the maid, when she does the laundry, finds the money and puts it in a little bleach cup in the basement. And this makes this woman, Rose, the new wife, crazy because it suggests a disrespect for money and it's embarrassing because this is not a wealthy family, but they have money to throw away. She's a Depression-era kid, so she's embarrassed by this, so she gets into a struggle with the little boy to stop leaving money in his pockets and she makes a new rule for the house that, from now on, if he leaves money in his pockets, the maid gets to keep whatever she finds in his pockets, which is a tiny and, really, sort of silly rule. And, of course, it's…she's not thinking at all about what this would feel like to Caroline, but it shifts the power arrangement in the house in this kind of radical way and changes the economic relationship with…. The little boy has transferred a lot of his feelings about his mother onto Caroline, who his mother liked, so, in his mourning, she's become sort of like a surrogate mother. And this little switch changes things in the house. And stuff happens. I don't know….

EUSTIS: It is the most—it's exquisite. I've heard it. It's gorgeous and Jeanine's done beautiful work.

KUSHNER: And it's short. I'm really proud of that. It's an hour and then an intermission and then it's another hour and then you get to go home. And it makes me feel like, you know, like I've had corrective surgery. I mean, I feel like a normal person, finally, it's really….

EUSTIS: Tony….

KUSHNER: But, on the other hand, there's Homebody, which is not short, so….

EUSTIS: And resists all attempts to get so.

KUSHNER: Oskar and I have worked on the play for five years now and one of the things is to try and make it behave itself as a normal play and it just won't do that.

EUSTIS: It might be interesting, actually, to talk about the attempt to shorten it and what that felt like and why that was unsatisfactory.

KUSHNER: Well, I just, you know, when the play first opened at New York Theatre Workshop in—was that December of 19—2001? 1910—it was 4 hours and 15 minutes long, with two intermissions. My partner, Mark, was standing in the lobby watching people go in and saw this elderly couple walk into the theatre and there was a sign that New York Theatre Workshop had thoughtfully posted on the door saying, "This play runs 4 hours and 15 minutes with two intermissions." And the guy stops and he stares at it for a few minutes, and he says, "Marge!" And his wife says, "What?" And he says [gestures to sign]. And she looks at it and says, "What do you want from me?"

So, Oskar and I worked on—Oskar actually came up with this very smart idea of simplifying the action. I can't really explain it because it's too much involving the plot, but one really incredible dramaturgical breakthrough that enabled me to restructure the play after New York to make it considerably shorter—I think we lost about 20 minutes and that's—listen to you laugh, but if you were in the theatre you wouldn't be laughing.

EUSTIS: We were down to three and a half.

KUSHNER: Yeah, to three and a half, but at New York Theatre Workshop it had gotten down to about 3:50. It reduced in the Workshop. And I decided to—for the next round of performances, I decided I wanted to see, if I removed a lot of the extra characters and some of the epic quality of it and really focused it in on what is, essentially, a family drama and sort of removed all the secondary level of characters, see if that would intensify it and make it shorter, make it more like a two-and-a-half-hour play. Because it starts with an hour-long monologue and I don't want to touch the monologue, so the rest of it is what got mucked around with. And I did. I actually pulled all those characters out and rewrote the whole thing and then we did a reading of it in New York of both versions, the one with all the characters out and then with them sort of back in. But the play had changed by having removed them and it had gotten better. So, now they're all back in, but the play is better and it's back up to 3 hours and 50 minutes, but it is better. I was just in Chicago and we cut about 10 pages in the last two days, so I think it going back towards three and a half hours. I figure, as long as it's under that, I'm reasonably safe.

EUSTIS: I remember when we were working on Angels you came to me, at one point, and—originally, of course, it was going to be a one-evening play.

KUSHNER: With songs.

EUSTIS: With songs. The singing auditions? And he came to me and said, "I can't get these people to change fast enough." And that was the way you opened the conversation about could we make this a two-evening play? To which, I explained, with my infinite dramaturgical wisdom, to Tony, why that wasn't necessary, he was just really panicking. And, well, we know who won. But that's your great theme, too: people changing and how people change. With Angels we used to say it was a more convincing portrait of people changing because, by the time everybody walked out of the theatre they had been through enough time to change. They were cellularly different people than when they walked in.

KUSHNER: Jeff King, one of the actors in the production, said, at one point said, "Enough time to change? It's enough time for them to learn trigonometry."

EUSTIS: But it is your great subject. It's not just what you talk about at podiums. It's been the subject of all your plays. Part of what's so moving about following your trajectory as a writer is watching you simultaneously be utterly convinced that change is the most important thing that societies can do and people can do and yet refuse to sugarcoat how hard it is and what the limitations are. Could you—is it possible to talk about Caroline a bit within that context?

KUSHNER: Well, the huge struggle…. I mean, the play's called Caroline, or Change and changing, changing times—it's set in the middle of '63 and the beginning of the civil rights movement, well, not the beginning, but the national awakening of the existence of a civil rights movement and the beginning of a tremendous transformation. The next year is going to bring the Voting Rights Act and the commencement of Great Society programs and all those other lovely things that we've now…sailed so far away from.

EUSTIS: Gutted.

KUSHNER: Gutted, sunk and besmirched. It's—the play is about somebody who doesn't, who can't do it, who can't do the difficult thing of letting go of what feels…. You know, I'm—I've been in psychoanalysis on and off for my entire adult life and I'm somebody who—I believe very deeply in a psychoanalytic, as well as very economic and political, model of human change, that change is both something that happens on the interior and on the exterior, that is has to, in some ways, that it begins who knows where. I mean, problems begin who knows where, from the outside in or in the inside or whatever. Genes—I mean, who knows how people are made, but they're clearly made from a compilation of both of those things. They—people can do heroic work to change themselves from within, but, if you're facing a large number of external difficulties as well, change on the inside is not going to be supported and probably not be entirely successful unless you're just a completely exceptional person. And I think this is the lie that we tell ourselves over and over again, that we sort of hold up the example of exceptional beings and fail to honor the mystery of why there occasionally are miraculous people who transcend impossible odds and use those people to represent everyone facing impossible odds, forgetting that most people facing poverty, facing, you know, facing the kind of brutalization that poverty really, the abuse of human beings, the child abuse that poverty constitutes don't survive it or can't survive it very well. Or, if they survive it, they should be honored for surviving it, but they can do very little more than that. So, it's sort of about—I mean for me….

There are two models of change in the theatre that we deal with: on one level, the sort of bad, bad theatre model that we understand that a character has to have an arc, so you have to set up a bunch of little problems for the character to have that are clearly expressed at the beginning so, at the end of the hour-and-a-half play, the character can register that he or she has gotten rid of them and therefore has had an arc. And then everybody goes home going, "Well, that was a nice arc." And it has nothing, nothing to do with change, which is an enormously costly, enormously difficult thing. Against that, there are sort of great theatrical expressions of a kind of despair over the possibility of change. Watching Long Day's Journey, that line—especially given Redgrave's radical reinterpretation of that part—it just jumps out at you in this kind of terrifying way: "The past is the present and the future as well." You feel all of the air getting sucked out of the theatre at that moment and everybody kind of wishing they were dead. Why people pay money to do this for four and a half hours is one of the great mysteries of the theatre.

EUSTIS: It's the greatest play.

KUSHNER: It is; it's just astonishing. And, at the end, of course, you are, in a sense, served up an aspect of the human condition that is devastating and inescapable, which is that all love is ambivalent and that ambivalence kills. There's something fatal in the inability of human beings to be Christ, to have pure love. And—it's such a Catholic play. It's incredibly…it's just amazing. And then, so at the end, there's a kind of feeling of death and hopelessness except, of course—

EUSTIS: He wrote it. Except he wrote it.

KUSHNER: Exactly. And that's true of Beckett, too; that the ability to understand this is the keyhole I mean that you can see a way out through. It's that there's a way, that the understanding is the possibility—and, of course, Edmund is there and he's the only one who…he alone…

EUSTIS: At Tao House, Carlotta describes him coming down to dinner for weeks on end and not saying anything, his hand shaking, going back up—the dedication, an act of forgiveness. An act of forgiveness blankets and embraces the entire thing.

KUSHNER: You know, and I think the same thing is true for Beckett. Then, on the other hand, there's Brecht. I think he has a very, very interesting but not yet completely understood, analysis of the way that people change, given the circumstance under which the plays in the theory were shaped. There's a degree of economic oversimplification sometimes, but, when you really look at the great plays, when you look at Courage, when you look at The Good Person of Setzuan or the Learning Plays, you see somebody who really profoundly understands. I mean, the thing that strikes me really the most in the Learning Plays: the metaphor for becoming part of a community is death. I mean, he got it and he honors it and I think that's something that theatre and Shakespeare certainly does.

EUSTIS: In Courage there's absolutely nothing facile because the point of it is the negativity. The point of it is not only her inability to change, but her inability to recognize her situation. He's not positing a superficial solution for her. He's positing the problem in the starkest and most inescapable fashion—as you did. I was thinking of the Mormon mother's speech, how that transformed. There's a speech of Louis's, "City of God," and it turned into "How do people change? It has something to do with God, so it's not very nice." It's extraordinary. Talk about—on a political model of change—can you talk a little about Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy.

KUSHNER: Well, I'm working on a play that I just decided to try and do without a lot of planning because it usually takes me a year or two just to write the first draft and 150 years, you know, to finish it and I would like to turn out more stuff. So—and also I'm just feeling, as you can probably tell—as I'm sure a lot of people in this room are—just overwhelmed with how bad things are and so angry. And I sat down at one point and decided to see what happened if I wrote a scene, with no real planing, in just one night. And I wrote a scene about Laura Bush, who I'm just fascinated by because she really apparently actually is a really big reader and, given who she's married to, that really is one of the most amazing paradoxes in American political history. [laughter] So, she is also from a family who is Democratic, big D Democrats, and there are indications that there are…other Bush wives…there's a political sensibility there that is rather at odds with the cynical, reactionary, plutocratic politics that have marked that family from its dishonorable beginnings. So, I've been fascinated by her. So I wrote this scene where she's doing an after-school reading program and she's reading to three Iraqi schoolchildren, who are all dead and who, when they speak to her, when they open their mouths to talk, speak in bird music, which was really from—I thought of it being from Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise. There's these unbelievable passages of bird music in that. She's come to read to them from her favorite book, which is, in fact, The Brothers Karamazov and she's going to read them her favorite section, which is "The Grand Inquisitor." [laughter] I mean that's just—I floated on clouds of sheer joy when I read that about two years ago. Is anybody else seeing this?

I'm amazed at how—I don't know what he conceivably could have been thinking when he did but I'm amazed—I said this, I gave a commencement speech last week in Chicago, and when I said it the audience gasped, but it was in the New York Times—but when he was touring Auschwitz, the only two things that people overheard him say to the guide were…. Well, he pointed out to Laura at one point, he said, "Look at the baby shoes." And then the other thing he said was, to the guide, "Does anyone ever challenge your statistics?" [gasps] But it's in the New York Times; I'm not making it up. And it hasn't been—nobody has—I mean, he couldn't conceivably—I mean, it just isn't possible, although, of course, it's completely possible. I mean, look who he's hanging out with. So, I mean, I'm waiting for someone to maybe ask him why he asked her that—but there it is, anyway. So, I wrote this scene and now I'm trying to stay up more nights and write more late-night scenes about…. I feel that, like Laura Bush—we all share one major thing in common with Laura Bush, which is that we're all being fucked by her husband. [laughter]

EUSTIS: Tony.

KUSHNER: I mean, that was the thing, the fun thing about writing her. We did a reading of it up at Providence with Annie Scurria playing—there's an angel who stands behind the Iraqi children and interprets the bird music for Laura Bush. Marsha Gay Harden has been reading her for us, she's at New York Theatre Workshop and she did it at Providence, and she's really astonishing. It's an astonishing Laura Bush. And it started out as this kind of joke, but as I got more into the Dostoyevsky and more into her reasons for loving "The Grand Inquisitor"…. The other great lover of Dostoyevsky in the administration is Condoleezza Rice, so one of the other scenes I'm working on is a reading group that they have every Thursday in the daytime. I mean, the Grand Inquisitor is sort of there for reactionaries to misinterpret, as they always have done. And, in some ways, it's not a misinterpretation because, in some ways, Dostoyevsky was a reactionary, but because he is such a great genius, what he says can't be—I mean, he can't contain a reactionary politic. A reactionary politic is too tiny for the size of his vision. It blows right past it into a kind of—it's like Kleist—into a kind of ideological indeterminacy that's truly at odds with any notion of….

EUSTIS: Balzac.

KUSHNER: Yeah, yeah. It just soars into another Saul Bellow. I mean, it soars into another realm, no matter what his intentions were and his intentions were never very good. I mean, he was a terrible person. And I became fascinated and the fun thing about being a playwright is what I was trying to say at the end of this rant up here is that, you know, you—if you're doing your job, you find new, something new and something unexpected and what I found was a real sympathy for her. That's really, I think, more unnerving that the "Saturday Night Live" kind of skit I had intended it to be at the beginning.

EUSTIS: And that transition shows in the course of the scene, which is about 20 minutes long. For those of you who haven't read it, rush out and get the back issue of The Nation. It starts out, for the audience in Providence—we did it for about a thousand people—and the laughs started, the laughs started quick and about three or four minutes into it the laughs were coming a little too quick and feeling a little shrill, and about seven or eight minutes it got very quiet except for a couple people who hadn't quite clued in yet, and it turned into something really astonishing because it feels like, from the listening of it, that you're going from a relatively superficial analysis of the inanities and contradictions of what it means to be alive at the Bush administration to an analysis of what it means to be complicit in the destruction of others in a way that you, yourself, are shielded from, but that we are not shielded from spiritually or morally and if you remain sensitive to the moral implications of the fact that we're interdependent—what that does to the spirit. And, by the end, you could feel this audience of absolutely knee-jerk lefties, like us, just moved and upset and complicit—and angry too, which is interesting because the piece and some of the responses to your talk that we got afterward were upset by this, in a way that was wonderful, I thought absolutely.

One last thing before we open it up to the microphones and have a chance to talk to Mr. Lincoln: I wonder if you could just say something about any other thoughts you might have about responding artistically to this historical moment. I mean, in a way, the three pieces that you've discussed are—as different as they are, they're obviously all a complete response to…. America is at a transition. America is on the verge of turning into something that, in our darkest moments, looks like something utterly…. This looks like the ghost of Caesar. This looks like an abandoning of the democratic basis of—the reinvigoration of the imperialistic impulse in a scary way. Is there anything else you want to say about that? Is there any—how you think about responding to that, as an artist, particularly.

KUSHNER: Yeah, well, what I firmly believe is that there is a lot of really remarkable response on the part of artists to the current—since 9/11. And, in some places, before 9/11—because 9/11 was a horror and a shock, but it wasn't unprepared for and it should not have taken us as much by surprise as it did because we knew it was coming. Long before we had code orange and code yellow we knew that something was going to…what we were doing was going to return to us, that it was going to be a response because these kinds of grotesque disparities of wealth and opportunity and the kind of colonization and exploitation that exists everywhere on the planet creates a violence. It is violence and creates violence in its wake—and no one is sheltered anymore. But I think there has been a rather impressive theatrical—I mean, some of it I could do without. There are things that I think have been a failure. There are shows that I've seen that seem to reinforce a kind of….

EUSTIS: Narcissism.

KUSHNER: Narcissism and a kind of unthinking nationalism as a sort of response, shows that simply—and this is always true of theatre, that opportunity, it was true during the AIDS epidemic as well and during any crisis—shows that sort of opportunistically use the fact that everyone enters the theatre deeply moved already by an outside event and says, "Okay, goody, I can do this because I'll get a lot of crying people in the end and they'll think it's because I'm a good whatever." That stuff sort of always exists and I find it unpleasant, but that's not the concern. On the other hand, there have been, you know, I think people are digging in. I was very moved to see, I think I mentioned it, the John Patrick Shanley and also Pete Gurney wrote plays about the horrendous situation in the Middle East. These are not Jewish men, so it's hard, in a way, for a Jewish person to say that they don't like Ariel Sharon or that they think this is an occupation and that they think the policies of the Sharon government and the Bush government endanger Jewish life and Palestinian life equally and that both are equally valuable. It's very hard, I think, to say it if you're not Jewish because then, I think, your immediate view—the accusation of anti-Semitism is even harder to answer. I was impressed that both of these guys took this subject on. Neither is a person who's written a lot that's overly political, but both were moved by—I mean, there's a kind of internationalism of vision that's coming in now. I've felt it too. I was sort of turned on to write Homebody/Kabul starting in 1997 because of the anti-globalism movement on college campuses. I thought they are really doing incredibly daring, important political work because they're saying it's not enough. We can have a nice, little, comfortable sort of pseudo-republic here and screw everybody else around the planet and that's just another version of Rome. It's not really a republic and if democracy is not to be a universally applied principle, then what good is it to have it in one little enclave? So, especially John Patrick Shanley, if you haven't read it, you absolutely have to get a copy of Dirty Story. It's, I think, just astonishing, astonishing play. And one of the things that's amazing about it is that it's—in addition to the courage it took to write it—is that the analysis of the Middle East in the play is so dead on, exactly perfectly pitched and right. And that's one of the things that makes it, I think, an astonishing play is that the politics of it are so good. It's what Peter Shumann used to say is that Bread and Puppet was better than most antiwar groups, not because they were better artists, but because their politics were better—so the art became better because it was closer to the truth.

So, I think there are powerful responses being made to the ideological depression that is the current political climate. I also think, though, that right now, in a time of crisis like this, we should not kid ourselves. Art is enormously powerful and I believe that art does a lot of kinds of things that other discourse can't do. I mean, when I gave Laura Bush to The Nation, to Katrina vanden Heuvel, she didn't know if she should publish it because The Nation has never published a play before, in 148 years. And they had a big discussion over whether or not to publish it and they said—this was right before the attack on Iraq started—and she said, "You know, we finally decided to do it basically because we felt that we'd written"—they'd sort of looked at the last five or six months of The Nation before it and said, "We've said literally every—we've made every argument you possibly could for not doing this. It's all there. So we've run out of things to say. We've said it all and it's all being said. So, we're sort of turning the magazine over for the next couple of weeks to playwrights and poets and whoever because why not?" It's sort of like there's nothing left. And I think that's the correct order for it. I think it's also the case that art isn't enough. And the most important thing for all of us to do now, if—by "us" I mean the people who agree with me that we are in an incredibly severe crisis in the republic at the moment—is to recognize that, whatever our day job is, you're not doing anything to save the republic by doing your day job. You're just doing your day job and good; you should do a good job with it. You have to also, as a citizen, set aside time afterwards for actual political work, for organizing. I think, just speaking personally—not that TCG necessarily endorses this—but the 2004 election is coming up. This man must not either be elected or manage to steal the White House a second time. So, defeating him, I think, becomes the most important thing that Americans can do. [applause] And your plays—you know, and I'll just say this one last thing and then I'll shut up—and you won't do it by doing plays. It was great when Artists Against War did Lysistrata readings; that was great. That doesn't do it. Poetry readings and play readings and all those things are great ways we can all keep our spirits up in dark times, but that isn't enough. And what is enough is the sort of dull work of political organizing, which isn't a lot of fun, but nothing takes its place. Marching in demonstrations and organizing people electorally, getting people out to vote and so on, raising money for, in my opinion, the Democratic party—those are the things that will save us. And, at some point you have to say you're really not going to save the world in a theatre. In fact, one of the things I think that makes the theatre work is that you're guaranteed the safety of complete inaction in the audience in the theatre and that's an important bargain that you make, but it has its limits. The world isn't changed by dreaming. The world is changed by taking what you learn in your dreams and acting.

EUSTIS: Questions? Does anyone have questions?

PETER ELLENSTEIN: Hi, I'm Peter Ellenstein with the William Inge Theatre Festival. And there's one thing that you said in your little talk to begin with that struck me as very similar to what Ted Halstead said in his talk. You said that we had opted for survival rather than fighting and he had talked about looking for a candidate that was willing to lose on principle. Both of those things seem to be what the Democrats and the artists have done since 1980, is that we ran away from the fight in order to try and survive. Whether trying to survive as individuals or as individual art organizations, we also do the same thing all the time, thinking that survival is what's important as opposed to the doing and the flourishing of what we're doing. I hearken back the Group Theatre lasting only 10 years, but really only 6 of those where they were the Group Theatre and the effect was probably the most profound effect on the American theatre. And, yet, that hardly lasted at all and now we're looking at survival and that we're hanging on as opposed to doing the things that the art is calling us to do. Clearly, you're in a position where you don't have to do that. You're able to keep going because you've been fortunate enough to also be successful, but if you can address sort of that idea of the chasing, as artists, our individual success as opposed to our individual work as artists and also as what groups are doing. I hope I've been clear.

KUSHNER: Yeah, I think—I just want to say really quickly that I don't think we should be looking for candidates who are willing to lose on principle. I think we should be looking for candidates who are willing to have principles and to win. And I don't think that politicians—the failure of politicians to stand up for their principles is not the failure, really, of the politicians. It's our failure. It's the failure to stop Congress from handing its war powers over to Bush and making our first really completely unprovoked, unilateral military war in American history—well, not the first, but…you know what I mean. But, on this scale, certainly a matter of executive decision. That's a horrendous failure. The Democrats should certainly be held responsible for it, but, on the other hand, they do it because they believe that they're not going to get the votes. It's become a chicken and the egg thing: If they were more principled, they would certainly mobilize people who…. But finally, it lies in us to not wait to be mobilized, but rather to mobilize. I mean, we can make—I always remember what Jesse Jackson said in, I think it was the second Democratic convention that nominated Clinton, we make good people. They don't come to us readymade. Roosevelt was a rich guy with no understanding of poverty until the poor in this country made sure by marching, by yelling and screaming, that he heard. And the Left, the progressive Left in this country had not yet abandoned the notion that government—as opposed to some anarchist fantasy of no government—that government could actually bring you good things. This is something that we believed all the way up until the mid-'60s and we sort of then gave up on the idea—I think Watergate and so on. That's a whole complicated discussion. So, you know, I think the failure to find politicians who can stand up on principle is also the populous is too demobilized and a lot of what has to happen now is that we have to ask ourselves questions about what our expectations are as citizens.

And, you know, I think that what I said, I meant. Survival is not nothing. Sometimes it's very impressive that you've survived. And I believed—I was sitting there thinking, this morning when I was writing that thing, what to say to these people because it seemed to me that there were more administrators here than I would imagine. It seemed to me, looking down the list, there were more administrators than writers or directors—or people do both. I hate it when artists get up, in America, and say, "Well, more money goes to administrative budgets than it does to artists and that's a terrible thing and that shows we have our priorities wrong." That's nonsense. I'm not stupid. I know I wouldn't have a chance to do my plays anywhere in the United States, I would not have a career, if I was reliant on the commercial theatre. Without the incredible staffs in all these theatres, there would be no theatres for me to do my work in—and I don't believe there's anything like opulence on any of the budgets of any nonprofit theatre in the country. In fact, there's an appalling level of underpayment, which you get the minute you walk in the door. You can just feel it in the room, you know? It's why we always get put up in those apartments that we're always put up in. It's one little way saying, "Fuck you. We don't get paid enough money." I think survival is an impressive fact. At this point, I think it's critical that it continue—but we also have to recognize the degree to which our survival means we're not growing.

I used to teach playwriting at NYU. I stopped doing it, but I'm still in touch with a huge number of young playwrights that I taught and there's not work for them. There are no second stages to do their work. They don't get to develop the way that they need to. And so on and so forth. And this is because we don't have a federal arts budget. There is no possibility of any—of a real culture in the United States without that. And what I meant was—one of the things that I mean is that we abandon certain—even though we deal in the power of words and in the power of vocal speech to change hearts and minds, we're somewhat profligate when it comes to looking at what aspects of the changed discourse of all of this that we're willing to accept. The idea that we should accept that people don't want to pay taxes—you've given away the whole game. It all started with Howard Jarvis. It all began—that's where it all began. Way back in the twilight of the Republican party after Watergate, this guy in California created this movement that gave them the beginnings of something that has grown to the Reagan counter-revolution, to something truly frightening. And we must not concede this. We must not concede good faith to the people that attack the NEA. There is no good faith there. They're as bad as people can be. And we have to be willing to have a rhetoric that does it because, God knows, they don't pull punches. They're certainly…you still have Rick Santorum, who's getting up and saying these appalling, I mean appalling, things, years after one would think you could do that in public and survive politically. And, yeah, he had a lot of trouble because times have changed, but Bush supported him, basically, and so he wasn't undone. And the Republican leadership in Congress supported him. So, we know what these people are now, so let's call them what they are. I think there's just a recalibration of the rhetoric that needs to happen—Oskar's term: technocrat. It can't become about little widgety adjustments in the system because it's not little widgety adjustments in the system that's necessary. Do you want to add to that?

EUSTIS: No, I think you said it beautifully, Tony. I think it's a recognition, from my point of view, not to speak for you. It's a recognition that things are arranged the way they're arranged because it's in certain people's interest and they have struggled powerfully to arrange them that way and if we want to change the arrangement, we have to accept that it's a struggle. It is a fight to rearrange it so that the benefits flow in different directions and it's a values argument and it's a structural argument. It's a structural argument based in the recognition that the system that has been developing serves some people very, very well. It works for them. They're getting what they want and they're not going to give it up without a fight.

KUSHNER: And, one last thing. It sort of frustrates me that two groups were picked by the Right for the beginnings of the attempt to roll back the '60s and roll back the Great Society and roll back even the New Deal—I mean, literally, the New Deal. Those two groups were artists and poor people. They were vulnerable—artists because of homophobia as sort of the glaring headline behind that race, and gender, but homophobia was the…I mean, Karen Finley is not about homophobia, it's about hatred of women. Holly Hughes and Tim Miller and John Fleck—that was about fag bashing. And poor people. There's a kind of a weird sort of privilege that you get when you get picked to be attacked by these people because it gives you a bully pulpit. It gives you a change to say, "Okay, let's think this through." Because what you're saying is exactly right. It's not really about—they don't care. They don't like gay people, they don't like women, they don't like black people, they don't like anybody but themselves. Lynne and Dick Cheney—they deserve each other. And that's what it is. But what it's really about are these outrageous tax cuts that they're now driving through with no…. These things would have been unthinkable. I mean, 25 years ago, had you proposed this, you would have been institutionalized. And they're sailing through and there's a little squabbling now about whether you're going to give poor kids, poor families tax cuts for their kids. That, insanely, Tom deLay can refuse Bush's after-the-fact worrying about it; that this is what the debate has become should make us all scream in horror. And it all began with the NEA, that was the thing. We just didn't look at it that way. We said, "Oh, we can't really stick up for Karen Finley because that's, unfortunately, not the right thing because she's really—that's the yams and that's terrible. You shouldn't be paying for that." I have a friend who has a cartoon, this great cartoon that she clipped out of some magazine. It's a guy with a big canvas and a beret, it's an artist. And painted on his canvas are the words, "You're an A-S-S-H-O" and then he's turning to this businessman and he says, "Can I have some more money to finish my painting?" And it's like—but that's exactly the point. If you can explain to people the logic of why the businessman should say, "Sure," you've won the battle for civilization. If you can't explain that, if you give up on that, civilization is finished. Literally, it starts. It's like those big general strikes in Paris in the '90s and the Times was asking this plumber, "Why are you on strike?" And he says, "My life is unbearable. I can't afford theatre tickets anymore." And the Times reported it as this joke, but that guy is exactly right. Life is unbearable without affordable theatre tickets. You win that and you've won the whole battle, I think. And we haven't risen to that challenge.

EUSTIS: Is anybody else going to approach the microphone?

MICHAEL BARON: You talk about change and I just want to say that both of you have changed my life. It was the most glorious thing to see you in the wedding pages.

KUSHNER: Oh, thanks. [applause]

BARON: As a gay man that is a huge public statement. It is your life as well as your work. And, as you're longtime collaborators, I was wondering if you could talk about what you've learned from each other.

EUSTIS: No. Thanks, Mike. But the wedding was fabulous. It was unbelievable. It was so emotional. I wept like a baby.

KUSHNER: Oskar was the master of ceremonies. He directed it.

EUSTIS: Nailing the chuppa together was really nice.

KUSHNER: Chuppa. [laughter]

EUSTIS: Mike, I don't need to tell you what we've learned from each other. You just saw it in action.

VICKIE NOLAN: Tony, I'm curious to know—Vickie Nolan, Yale Rep—when you say that, for you, the concentration has to be on the Democratic, getting a Democrat in office—I'm not hearing anyone who's speaking in a way that's eloquent. What do we do about that?

KUSHNER: You elect Al Gore's dirty laundry, if that's the choice between—you know. Politics is the choice between the lesser of two evils. That's what it is. It's not an expression of political purity. It's not an expression of—I mean, if you don't believe in the lesser of two evils…well, I mean now. I used to say, "If you don't believe in the lesser of two evils, look in Iraq and Sharon," but we don't have to go that far a field any more. Look at the United States. This would not have—what has happened now—and I believe, and I'm sure many of you have different feelings about this, but I'm hoping that I'm wrong—that what looks like what's taking place in Iraq is not what's taking place in Iraq and that Bush is eventually successful, whatever that would mean. I'm not entirely sure what that would mean because I'm not entirely sure what we're aiming at. But it looks like what we're heading into is exactly what everybody warned against, which is this horrendous quagmire that looks like it's going to go on for a very long time and prove to be hideously costly to this country, not to mention, of course, the cost for the Iraqi people, about which we know nothing. How many people have died? There are no body counts. There's nothing. We know nothing about what we've done to these people, nothing at all. We'll learn eventually, the hard way, but we don't know right now. And if, of course, in the meanwhile, Afghanistan, which we barely bothered—I mean, I remember when Bush forgot the line item in his budget last year for Afghanistan and it had to be replaced, quickly, at the last minute by congressional budget technicians. He forgot to include it. So that's, I think, sort of the extent of the interest in rebuilding Afghanistan, as opposed to what he's doing now, which is basically rearming the warlords. I think that it doesn't matter. I believe that the demographics of the people who are the Democratic party are more representative of the people of the United States than the people of the Republican party. I wish that there was a genuinely progressive party in the United States. I don't know that there is, but this is not a party of millionaires and it's not a party of white men and it's not a party that makes its deals with the devil every other minute—anti-reproductive rights, anti-gay, white supremacist, Religious Right from the South, about which I know something because I grew up with those people and they're very, very scary. And the Republican party has sailed into power after Watergate by making deals with these people over and over again. And so, there is, to me, no choice. I assume it's going to be Edwards because he's raising more money. I would guess.

EUSTIS: No.

KUSHNER: But I—who do you think it's going to be?

EUSTIS: I don't think it will be Edwards.

KUSHNER: Maybe it won't be Edwards. He's cute. He's not very smart, but he's cute. I don't know who it's going to be, but I think it's going to be a very tough fight and I do not believe that we have the luxury to really scruple to…. Whoever it is, get in there, work with the people he's likely to appoint and make him into a better person. We are the ones—Bill Clinton signed DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, and the welfare bill because we let him do it. That was our doing and we have to take responsibility for it. He is the flawed person and the immensely talented politician that he is. But we have a chance of being heard. I saw, when we went to see the Sondheim musicals at the Kennedy Center this summer—which was one of the artistic high points of my entire life, really, really amazing. I've sort of decided that he is actually not just as good as the great musical writers; he's better. There's really some kind of staggering genius there. But in the lobby, you can push buttons and hear different JFK speeches. And there's a speech that he made during the civil rights demonstration in Birmingham and Selma. It's an amazing speech—I'd never read it before—where he says, "We're not going to allow mob rule"—and you think, "Oh, yeah, here it comes." "This is a country that works by representative government and we're not going to have mob rule. It's not going to be rule on the streets, but what happens on the streets matters. And we have to take what we are learning from the people on the street and tell them, 'We are hearing you and we'll do something about it.'" And so what he's describing is a real dialectic between grassroots activism and representative government that makes democracy work, makes representative democracy work, which is the kind of democracy you can have in a country of this size. And losing that wisdom—I believe that that dialectic can be reawakened.

EUSTIS: I'm going to have to stop us, but what I want to say is the three projects that we've talked about: Homebody/Kabul, which is, at the time you started writing it, about a country that most of my audience wouldn't have been able to pick out on a map, Afghanistan.

KUSHNER: There's a map in the bathroom, down here, of Afghanistan, if you want to see one.

EUSTIS: That's the other thing, Mike. Try to tell him he's done talking. Caroline, which is based on the town and the place that you grew up and the time era that you grew up. We Who Guard the Mysteries, which is taken from the headlines in response to a contemporary political figure. Three extremely different texts, but all of them doing the same thing: trying to diagnose the relationship between the personal and the political scene and how the personal is political and seeing how art can underline and point out and understand they way that not only the personal and the political are connected, but how we are all connected in ways that we don't see, in ways that seem to rest under the surface, but lift them up and understand cause and effect. It's an astonishing artistic project that you are engaged in, Mr. Kushner. And it's what I want to say to what you said, Peter, about careers, having watched this man for the best part of two decades now. One of, I think, the astonishing things about your career is that your career has flourished—not because he's fortunate—but because you've been true to the principles. It was wrong to do a two-evening play, when nobody knew who you were, about gay men. It was the wrong thing to do career-wise and any-other-wise, except that it was the thing that had to be done to tell the truth that you knew, to not worry about what was popular, but to tell the truth. That's, for me, the most inspiriting example of what an artist is supposed to do that I know. And all of us in the American theatre are lucky to have you among us.