It’s the birthday of playwright Tony Kushner (books by this author), born in Manhattan (1956). One of his friends became sick with AIDS in the mid-1980s, a time when the disease was only first beginning to be identified. Kushner had a dream about an angel coming through the roof of his friend’s bedroom, and he wrote a poem about it called “Angels in America.” A couple of years later, he started writing a long play about the AIDS virus, and a group of characters living in Reagan-era New York, including a married Mormon man who realizes he is gay; Roy Cohn — the lawyer who prosecuted supposed communists during the McCarthy era; a former drag queen who becomes Cohn’s nurse; the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg; and an angel. It was in two parts, called “Millennium Approaches” and “Perestroika,” and the whole play was called Angels in America. It won the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Awards.
Kushner has written many plays since then, including Homebody/Kabul (2001) and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures (2009).
Earlier this year, the City University of New York announced that they would issue an honorary degree to Kushner — and then decided to revoke that honor because a pro-Israel member of the board of trustees took issue with Kushner’s critique of Israeli policy. Kushner, who is Jewish, was outraged, as was just about everyone associated with CUNY. Several past recipients of honorary degrees, including the writers Michael Cunningham and Barbara Ehrenreich, declared that they were returning their degrees in protest. Soon after, a higher authority at CUNY stepped in and announced that the university had decided to award him the degree after all.
Tony Kushner said: “I think that’s what theater is about. You believe it and you don’t believe it simultaneously, which engages a certain part of your brain that has to do with being skeptical about the nature of what you’re experiencing in life. That’s why theater is important. You learn to go out into the world after you see a play that you really loved and look at politics and love and all sorts of other human phenomena in the same way. It’s real and yet it isn’t.”
SUNDAY, JULY 17, 2022
“What can I do for the Church? Not complaining about the Church, but committing myself to the Church. Participating with passion and humility: with passion, because we must not remain passive spectators; with humility, because being committed within the community must never mean taking centre stage, considering ourselves better and keeping others from drawing near. That is what a synodal Church means: everyone has a part to play, no individual in the place of others or above others. There are no first or second class Christians; everyone has been called.”
Pope Francis
The Vibrant Channeled Creator 