Tony Kushner Biographical Notes
He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993 for his play Angels in America, then adapted it for HBO in 2003. He co-authored the screenplay for the 2005 film Munich, and he wrote the screenplay for the 2012 film Lincoln.
Kushner was born in Manhattan, the son of Sylvia and William David Kushner. His family is Jewish, descended from immigrants from Russia and Poland. Shortly after his birth, Kushner’s parents moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana where he spent his childhood. During high school Kushner was active in policy debate. In 1974, Kushner moved back to New York to begin his undergraduate college education at Columbia University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Medieval Studies in 1978. He attended the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, graduating in 1984. During graduate school, he spent the summers of 1978–1981 directing both early original works (Masque of the Owls and Incidents and Occurrences During the Travels of the Tailor Max) and plays by Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest) starring the children attending the Governor’s Program for Gifted Children in Lake Charles.
Kushner has received several honorary degrees: in 2003 from Columbia College Chicago, in 2006 an honorary doctorate from Brandeis University, in 2008 an honorary Doctor of Letters from SUNY Purchase College, in May 2011 an honorary doctorate from CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice and also an Honorary Doctorate from The New School, and in May 2015, an honorary Doctor of Letters from Ithaca College.
Kushner’s best known work is Angels in America (a play in two parts: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika), a seven-hour epic about the AIDS epidemic in Reagan-era New York, which was later adapted into an HBO miniseries for which Kushner wrote the screenplay. His other plays include Hydriotaphia, Slavs!: Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness, A Bright Room Called Day, Homebody/Kabul, and the book for the musical Caroline, or Change. His new translation of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children was performed at the Delacorte Theater in the summer of 2006, starring Meryl Streep and directed by George C. Wolfe. Kushner has also adapted Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan, Corneille’s The Illusion, and S. Ansky’s play The Dybbuk.
In the early 2000s, Kushner began writing for film. His co-written screenplay Munich was produced and directed by Steven Spielberg in 2005. In January 2006, a documentary feature about Kushner entitled Wrestling With Angels debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. The film was directed by Freida Lee Mock. In April 2011 it was announced that he was working with Spielberg again, writing the screenplay for an adaptation of historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. The screenplay for Lincoln would go on to receive multiple awards, in addition to nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Golden Globes and The Oscars. In a 2015 interview actress/producer Viola Davis revealed she had hired Kushner to write an as yet untitled biopic about the life of Barbara Jordan that she planned to star in. In 2016, Kushner worked on a screenplay version of August Wilson’s play Fences; the resulting film Fences, directed by Denzel Washington, was released in December 2016.
Kushner is famous for frequent revisions and years-long gestations of his plays. Both Angels in America: Perestroika and Homebody/Kabul were significantly revised even after they were first published. Kushner has admitted that the original script version of Angels in America: Perestroika is nearly double the length of the theatrical version.[18] His newest completed work, the play The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, began as a novel more than a decade ago. Said work finally opened on May 15, 2009. In 2018 it was announced that Kushner was working on a script of a remake of West Side Story for Spielberg to direct
Kushner and his husband, Mark Harris, held a commitment ceremony in April 2003,[33] the first same-sex commitment ceremony to be featured in the Vows column of The New York Times.[34] Harris is an editor of Entertainment Weekly and author of Pictures at a Revolution — Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood. In summer 2008, Kushner and Harris were legally married at the town hall in Provincetown, Massachusetts
