The Tony Kushner Collection

Press Quotes

ANGELS IN AMERICA, PART ONE: MILLENNIUM APPROACHES

“Daring and dazzling! The most ambitious American play of our time: an epic that ranges from earth to heaven; focuses on politics, sex and religion; transports us to Washington, the Kremlin, the South Bronx, Salt Lake City and Antarctica; deals with Jews, Mormons, WASPs, blacks; switches between realism and fantasy, from the tragedy of AIDS to the camp comedy of drag queens to the death or at least the absconding of God.” ⁠—⁠Jack Kroll, Newsweek

“A vast miraculous play … provocative, witty and deeply upsetting … a searching and radical rethinking of American political drama … PERESTROIKA is not only a stunning resolution of the rending human drama of MILLENIUM APPROACHES, but also a true millennial work of art, uplifting, hugely comic and pantheistically religious in a very American style.” ⁠—⁠Frank Rich, New York Times

“Something rare, dangerous and harrowing … a roman candle hurled into a drawing room …” ⁠—⁠Nicholas de Jongh, London Evening Standard

“An epic theatrical fever dream … a three-hour cliffhanger that leaves you wanting more.” ⁠—⁠Variety

“A victory for theater, for the transforming power of the imagination to turn devastation into beauty. ANGELS IN AMERICA is a monumental achievement, the work of a defiantly theatrical imagination that has no parallel on television or in the movies. It ennobles Broadway as no other work in recent memory has.” ⁠—⁠Jeremy Gerard, Variety

“Not since Tennessee Williams has a playwright announced his poetic vision with such authority on the Broadway stage … PERESTROIKA is a masterpiece.” ⁠—⁠John Lahr, The New Yorker

“Establishes Kushner as a poet and moral visionary in love with the theater yet awake in the world.” ⁠—⁠Don Shewey, The Village Voice

“Playful and profound, extravagantly theatrical and deeply spiritual, witty and compassionate, furious and incredibly smart … It’s impossible to imagine anyone captivated by the beginning not wanting ⁠—⁠ needing ⁠—⁠ to go back for the end.” ⁠—⁠Linda Winer, Newsday

ANGELS IN AMERICA, PART TWO: PERESTROIKA

“PERESTROIKA is not only a stunning resolution of the rending human drama of MILLENIUM APPROACHES, but also a true millennial work of art, uplifting, hugely comic and pantheistically religious in a very American style.” ⁠—⁠Frank Rich, New York Times

“Playful and profound, extravagantly theatrical and deeply spiritual, witty and compassionate, furious and incredibly smart … It’s impossible to imagine anyone captivated by the beginning not wanting ⁠—⁠ needing ⁠—⁠ to go back for the end.” ⁠—⁠Linda Winer, Newsday

“ANGELS IN AMERICA is a monumental achievement, the work of a defiantly theatrical imagination that has no parallel on television or in the movies. It ennobles Broadway as no other work in recent memory has.” ⁠—⁠Jeremy Gerard, Variety

“Not since Tennessee Williams has a playwright announced his poetic vision with such authority on the Broadway stage … PERESTROIKA is a masterpiece.” ⁠—⁠John Lahr, New Yorker

A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY

“Tony Kushner’s A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY … is unabashedly political, thought-provoking, a little scary, and frequently a good deal of theatrical fun … BRIGHT ROOM is … an examination of Nazi Germany in an attempt to shed insight on our own time. It’s brash, audacious, and, depending on your politics, anything from infuriatingly naïve to intoxicatingly visionary. In its 1932-33 span, it tells of a group of Berlin artists and friends, with varying degrees of communist leanings, and of the changes in their lives as democracy falls and Adolph Hitler takes over.” ⁠—⁠Sid Smith, Chicago Tribune

“It’s fun to see a show this engaged. This passionate and ready to talk. Wild, uneven, pugnacious, ragged, committed, smart, dumb, satirical, and utterly serious … Always dramatically and intellectually forceful. And most important, always passionately committed. More than a diatribe against Reagan or a falling-into-the-Nazi-abyss history play, A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY is an assertion of the need for commitment.” ⁠—⁠Anthony Adler, The Reader

A DYBBUK OR BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

“The translation of Joachim Neugroschel, savvily adapted by Tony Kushner, and now further revised by him as A DYBBUK OR BETWEEN TWO WORLDS, all come funnily, furiously, crotchetily alive.” ⁠—⁠John Simon, New York Magazine

“Kushner’s contemporary reading has served to burnish the original’s mixture of spiritual exhalation and material poverty, abstract symbolism and exotic superstition.” ⁠—⁠J. Hoberman, The Forward

“S Ansky’s mystical Yiddish drama THE DYBBUK is a play almost perfectly suited to Tony Kushner’s tastes and talents. With its evocative picture of a metaphysical world that shadows our own, and the spiritual price to be paid for avaricious self-interest, it has intriguing correspondences with Kushner’s own metaphysical epic, ANGELS IN AMERICA.” ⁠—⁠Christopher Isherwood, Variety

HOMEBODY/KABUL

“Tony Kushner’s HOMEBODY/KABUL is the most remarkable play in a decade … without a doubt the most important of our time.” ⁠—⁠John Heilpern, New York Observer

“This compelling evening testifies that Mr Kushner can still deliver his sterling brand of goods: a fusion of politics, poetry and boundless empathy transformed through language into passionate, juicy theater … a reminder of how essential and heartening Mr Kushner’s voice remains.” ⁠—⁠Ben Brantley, New York Times

“What a feast of a play. No playwright in the English language has a greater passion for language than Kushner. And to this Kushner adds that rare quality in American theater, a yearning to go beyond domestic stories and into the great world of political struggle. Brilliant. It keeps us thinking.” ⁠—⁠Richard Christiansen, Chicago Tribune

“HOMEBODY/KABUL is a rich and intelligent piece.” ⁠—⁠Peter Brook

“Kushner’s first big work on a great big canvas since his Pulitzer Prize–winning ANGELS IN AMERICA. This eerily timely work about Afghanistan is comparably mesmerizing and mournful, vast and intimate, emotionally generous and stylistically fabulist, wildly verbal, politically progressive and scarily well informed.” ⁠—⁠Linda Winer, Newsday

“An extraordinary play … a deeply felt expansively ruminative drama.” ⁠—⁠Paul Taylor, The Independent

“HOMEBODY/KABUL brings a passionate, critical voice to the conversation about world events. In the play, Kushner wrestles with his own complicated attitudes about a land whose destiny has been shaped by superpowers with agendas. The Kabul we see here is a place of great history and great cruelty, where Eastern and Western characters alike search for redemption in God or heroin or other people. It is a product of astounding timeliness. The cultural artifact of the moment.” ⁠—⁠Michael Phillips, Los Angeles Times

HYDRIOTAPHIA OR THE DEATH OF DOCTOR BROWNE

“… [HYDRIOTAPHIA] shows off its author’s dazzling intellect, wit and ambition to richly enjoyable effect … Subtitled ‘An Epic Farce About Death and Primitive Capital in Five Scenes,’ the play flourishes Kushner’s trademark ability to mix up wildly diverse tonalities and ideas ⁠—⁠ bawdy humor, theological and class warfare debate, fourth-wall-breaking, dizzying monologues, fantasy and domestic intrigue all whirl like a juggler’s pins.” ⁠—⁠Dennis Harvey, Variety

THE ILLUSION

“In an eminently playable, witty adaptation by Tony Kushner, THE ILLUSION comes across as downright entertaining, not an adjective anyone who reads Corneille in college is likely to expect. Unlike his better known plays, which have heroic subjects, THE ILLUSION is concerned with domestic matters, the alienation of parents from children, marital infidelity. While it is serious about these subjects, it puts them in an unusual context: A father has consulted a magician about his estranged son, and the magician shows him scenes from his son’s life … The comedy is elegant, full of depth …” ⁠—⁠Howard Kissel, Daily News

“What are the real powers of sorcery? To alter? To define? To transport? Tony Kushner and Pierre Corneille before him go for all three, which is only part of the magic in Kushner’s fanciful adaptation of Corneille’s L’ILLUSION COMIQUE. Freely adapted it is, in the best sense. For Corneille, whose later, loftier verse plays earned him the stodgy title of Father of French Tragedy, THE ILLUSION was a mildly satirical precursor to all that, a glitch, written when he was only twenty-nine. Yet even then, it was burdened by a ponderous 17-century neo-classical style that kept the word comique out of 20-century range. Kushner’s achievement is digging under all the circumlocution to salvage an ageless and universal tale, stripping the nugget of its ornamentation and serving it up to us lingually lucid and lean. There is some colloquial indulgence in the rewritten language, but it’s mostly judicious. We’re in on the joke, which never goes too far. Simply put, this the tale of a rigid father, Pridament, who, stricken with remorse for having provoked his son to flee the family home, searches out the magician Aleandre in the hope that he will help him find out what happened to the wayward boy. Aleandre does, and the ironic twist of the piece is that after several false starts, passionate re-enactments, comic delusions and confusions, the truth is revealed and Papa finds he doesn’t like it. The light-hearted ending is a cynical but honest lesson in selective affection. All the fun, however, is in getting there. THE ILLUSION takes us into territory on which theater thrives: fantasy, witchcraft, transcended place and time …” ⁠—⁠Sylvie Drake, Los Angeles Times

“What a fascinating, totally theatrical excursion we’re in for in this 17th-century fairytale-fable first spun by French classical dramatist Pierre Corneille. In 1639, L’ILLUSION COMIQUE was a comedy they didn’t know what to make of; 20th-century playwright Tony Kushner knows what to make of it. Triumphantly exhumed and enlivened three and a half centuries later in Kushner’s fresh, free adaptation; it proves indeed to be … ‘a prematurely modern play.’ Both modern and ancient, timeless and timely, flippant and profound … It is a thorough delight … L’ILLUSION COMIQUE was a masterpiece waiting for its time to happen. Tony Kushner made it happen and made it better. It is essence of theater, essence of archetypal magic. Carl Jung would have loved it.” ⁠—⁠Polly Warfield, Drama-Logue

SLAVS!

“Tony Kushner bears the curse of all artists unlucky enough to have captured the zeitgeist. They are expected to continue on their visionary path, explicating the world’s mysteries in each new play. Or they are tempted to use the stage as a bully pulpit, indicting the cause of our malaise and dolling out prescriptions to sooth the pain. It is a mark of Kushner’s sophistication that in his newest play he refuses to rest on his well-earned moral authority. A lesser writer would have followed ANGELS IN AMERICA with something smug and sweeping. As though Kushner feared such a fate, he instead has returned to where he started ⁠—⁠ a place of healthy confusion. A taut play results: Kushner’s humor buoys his political anguish, his lyricism draws dry ideas into rhapsodies and elegies, his interest in character won’t let even the most vaudevillian individual conform to type.” ⁠—⁠Marc Robinson, The Village Voice

“The heaven that Tony Kushner envisions in the epilogue of SLAVS!, his bracing, rational 80-minute fantasia is a dark, gloomy place designed to look like a city after an earthquake … he has created a rambunctiously funny, seriously moving stage piece that is part buffoonish burlesque and part tragic satire. From beginning to end, it’s also shot through with the kind of irony virtually unknown in today’s theater, movies and television, where sarcasm passes as wit. There were hints of this exaggerated style in his epic MILLENNIUM APPROACHES and PERESTROIKA, collectively known as ANGELS IN AMERICA … Mr Kushner has emphasized that SLAVS! Is not to be taken as the work of a historian. Rather, it’s a work of a brilliant and restless imagination. Mr Kushner’s words dazzle, sting and prompt belly laughs.” ⁠—⁠Vincent Canby, The New York Times

TINY KUSHNER

“As a title, TINY KUSHNER sounds like a joke, and it is, of sorts, a self-deprecating acknowledgment by the playwright Tony Kushner that he generally writes long. His most famous work, ANGELS IN AMERICA, began as a commission for a 90-minute play with three characters and ended up as a two-part extravaganza clocking in at more than seven hours … The new work consists of five one-act playlets that feature both fictional characters and those borrowed from real life ⁠—⁠ including Dr Arnold Hutschnecker, who was Richard M Nixon’s psychiatrist. Two plays have therapy sessions in them, actually. Three have dead people as characters. One takes place on the moon. All five, however, resonate on the subject of America and the moral complexities created for its citizens by its various advantages in the world, a theme that reaches a climax in ONLY WE WHO GUARD THE MYSTERY SHALL BE UNHAPPY. Set just before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and written out of fury at the Bush administration’s rush to war, it posits Laura Bush reading to a class of dead Iraqi children. Essentially a monologue (it was published by The Nation), it portrays a first lady wrestling with her conscience and betraying the agony of perpetual self-justification … Individually and even collectively, the five entries here are snacks in the Kushner canon. However, that doesn’t make them nonnourishing or the evening unsatisfying; Mr Kushner’s fierce liberal conscience (he’s Arthur Miller’s heir, in that regard), colossally fanciful imagination and virtuosic gift for composing verbal arias are too much in evidence for that.” ⁠—⁠Bruce Weber, The New York Times

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