Born in Manhattan
in July of 1956, Tony Kushner grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana
where his family moved after inheriting a lumber business. He
earned a bachelors degree from Columbia University and later
did postgraduate work at New York University. In the early 1980s,
he founded a theater group and began writing and producing plays.
In the early 1990s, he scored a monster hit with the epic, seven-hour,
two-part, Broadway blockbuster Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia
on National Themes which earned for Kushner a Pulitzer Prize,
two Tony Awards, two Drama Desk Awards, the Evening Standard
Award, two Olivier Award Nominations, the New York Critics Circle
Award, the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award and the LAMBDA
Liberty Award for Drama. This groundbreaking play focuses on
three households in turmoil: a gay couple, one of whom has AIDS;
a Morman man coming to terms with his sexuality; and the infamous
lawyer Roy Cohn, a historical figure who died of AIDS in 1986,
denying his homosexuality all the way to his deathbed. NEWSWEEK
wrote of Angels in America:
"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."
Kushner has also written A Bright Room Called Day and
Slavs! (from material not used in Angels in America),
as well as several adaptations including Goethe's Stella,
Brecht's The Good Person of Setzuan, Corneille's the
Illusion, and S. Ansky's The Dybbuk. His work has
been produced at the Mark Taper Forum, the New York Shakespeare
Festival, New York Theatre Workshop, Hartford Stage Company,
Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Los Angeles Theatre Center
as well as theatres in over 30 countries across the globe. He
is the recipient of a 1990 Whiting Foundation Writers Award and
playwriting and directing fellowships from the New York Foundation
for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts and the
National Endowment for the Arts. Mr. Kushner is currently an
adjunct faculty member of New York University's Dramatic Writing
program.
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