Tony Kushner and Naomi Wallace

SEASON PREVIEW CONVERSATIONS

Grist for a Writer’s Mill

TONY KUSHNER and NAOMI WALLACE met in 1994 when he came to the University of Iowa to teach a playwriting workshop, and since then they have shared their thoughts about politics and playwriting in an ongoing correspondence. Kushner’s new play Homebody/Kabul opens Nov. 30 at New York Theatre Workshop, and he is directing Ellen McLaughlin’s new play Helen later in the season at the Public Theater as well as writing the teleplays for an upcoming HBO adaptation of Angels in America. Wallace, the recipient of a 1999 “genius” grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, will be recognized in October and November with a unique cooperative celebration of her work by 12 theatre companies in Atlanta. Kushner and Wallace exchanged these letters in August.

DEAR NAOMI,
I’ve written a play called Homebody/Kabul. It’s about Afghanistan, a subject that has fascinated and concerned me for many years—the sort of historical and political situation that plunges you into an examination of your own assumptions about possibility, change, the meaning of history, about your role and your country’s role in the world. I hope I’ve done a good job with all that examining. But already I’m saying more than I want to say. Shouldn’t playwrights really be mute and let their plays do the talking?

There’s so much to write about these days, with this unelected, profiteering, blood-spattered, sneering, brainless embarrassment of a plutocrat in the White House, with NASA deciding to decommission its ozone layer observational satellite while the evidence mounts that environmental apocalypse is just around the corner, with the ABM missile treaty out and Star Wars back in, with the miserable non-response of the world’s wealthy to the pandemic of AIDS, with the spreading of antidemocratic, conscienceless, unfettered free-market marauding of the world’s societies and economies, with every social net disintegrating and the war criminal Ariel Sharon doing the Devil’s work to eliminate any chance for peace in the Mideast, and the Durban racism conference fucked, and all the bloody rest of it; with a single theatre ticket costing more that what the average third-world worker takes home from two years’ work, with the NEA dead dead dead and NO ONE YELLING ABOUT IT, with letters in the mail telling us that our $300 tax refund—from a tax cut which is clearly an act of violence against people in need—comes gratis from “President” Bush ($33 million of our money they spent mailing those letters, $33 MILLION!)…. So much grist for our mills! And there are a lot of good playwrights around these days, tilling the earth, learning from the traces of earthworm action (I have a garden now), offering up our salutary confusions, our questions. And I hope we all find time as well for action, for activism. We shouldn’t be unheroic. It should all always be risky.

Your admiring, adoring comrade,
TK

DEAR TONY,
I’m honored to say there will be a festival of my plays in Atlanta this October, something like 12 theatre readings and productions of my work. My most recent play, The Inland Sea, will open in England next spring. It’s about the 18th-century British landscape artist Capability Brown, about appropriation of land, the politics of space, drowned villages, unspeakable acts, naughty bits of the body, with a couple of who-done-its thrown in for good measure. It’s the biggest/longest thing I’ve written.

Yes, one might fall into total despair at the enormity of global economic and social injustice. It’s the earthworm that gives us hope. It’s all too easy to overlook what is also going on at the local level. Wednesday night here in Louisville there was a meeting to welcome a representative of the “Movement for Displaced Afro-Columbians.” Sitting together were African-American folk with Latina sisters and several white queer activists, all making connections between black youth in Louisville and poor farmers being run off their land in Colombia because of U.S. foreign policy. A grassroots black theatre group, a queer Louisville youth group, and the Fairness Campaign (the civil rights organization for LesBiGayTrans people that my sister Carla helped create) are working on a joint theatre project. And hundreds, black and white, gathered yesterday in Louisville to demand a living wage ordinance. This is the stuff that inspires me when I sit at my desk flicking out tiny pieces of possibility into the darkness. Folks are figuring out—in this world of corporate-sponsored nightmare and poverty—how to build relationships across difference in order to organize resistance.

When I get down on my hands and knees and look, there is movement, little pieces of dirt being turned over, little pieces of possibility turning, turning all over, sometimes not immediately visible, but there, localized movement, earthworm activity which might (forgive me for stretching this metaphor until I kill it) turn up fresh earth, yes, watered by the blood that capitalism has sucked from both labor and spirit. I think it’s important that we hold up these acts of resistance. Perhaps the substance, the dream of a better world, is in the very act of resistance. I remember what veteran civil rights activist Anne Braden said to me recently: The impossible just takes a little longer.

All my love and hope,
Naomi

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