the perfectionist: an interview with playwright tony kushner

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But in calling yourself a Jewish writer, aren’t you
also implying that Jewishness informs your art?
You’ve even referred to “Angels in America”—your
masterwork—as a Jewish play.
I think you could trace certain themes or aspects that
owe something to Jewish intellectual and dramatic
traditions and gay traditions. Angels is explicitly [Jewish]—I
didn’t intend it to be when I first started
writing it, it just sort of came out that way. There’s a
very powerful spine of the play that is this sort of
tracking the Jewish characters. But I also think that a
play like Homebody/Kabul, or the play that I’m working
on right now—which has no Jews in it—are
Jewish plays. Homebody/Kabul also has no gay people
in it, but I consider it to be, in a certain sense, a “gay”
play, in the sense that it’s written by a gay Jew and an
American gay Jew.
You seldom compartmentalize your art and your
identity-based politics.
I’ve really come to feel that any categorization like
political, spiritual—that these things are all so murky.
There is some level on which these are simply
different perspectives from which to view the same
problem. And the problem is never viewable if you
refuse access entirely to any one of the numerous
frameworks, any one of the numerous discourses.
If you try and understand politics and you have no
understanding of psychology, or for that matter spirituality,
or philosophy, or history, you’re going to be a
[expletive] politician. If you try to write about people,
and pay no attention to what’s happening in the
world around them—or try and write about God…
I mean, go look at Isaiah. The bible is political. The
prophets are full of it: Don’t [expletive] over the poor.
Don’t be a greedy pig. Make sure that you behave in
the world in a decent fashion. In fact, it’s perfectly le-
gitimate to say that, in a certain sense, Judaism doesn’t
ask you to do anything other than that. Do those
things, and the rest of it—whatever.
I read somewhere about your affection—I think
you described it almost in terms of kinship—for
the Yiddish playwright S. Ansky. As the story goes,
you adapted “The Dybbuk” after hearing a Yiddish
poem and being struck by the sonorousness of it.
Do you recall that moment? Was it really an ur-moment
in the gestation of the play?
Vanessa Redgrave did a benefit for Sarajevo, and she
had, among many other people, an old Yiddishspeaking
actress. It was incredible…I remember the
word “shtein” kept coming up. Possibly, she was going
through the names of both shtetls of Eastern Europe
and the names of the camps, and after each one she
would say shtein. It was stunningly beautiful. And it
did have a sound in Yiddish that I wasn’t…it was just
like when I listened to the Klezmatics for the first time
and heard that kind of very sexy, very lyrical sound—
a kind of lyrical and voluptuous sound that I wasn’t
accustomed to in the Yiddish that I took here, which
was mostly sayings and curses.
Yiddish you’d learned from your grandmother.
My grandmother, Sarah, and then my mother and her
sisters. I would pick up bits and pieces. You know,
I just did the introduction to Sholem Aleichem’s
novel, Wandering Stars, it’s a Yiddish theatre novel,
and it’s staggering the way it’s full of the most outrageous
curses. My favorite is “Go bake bagels in hell.”
There’s just an endless talent for invective. There’s a
great deal of rage caught up in it, which is one of the
things that’s really interesting.