Tony Kushner
Personal Information
Description
Marcus Sieff Professor of the History of Jewish/non Jewish Relations and Director of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton in the U.K.
Books
The illusion
Tobias and the other Animorphs discover that the Yeerks, a parasitic alien race bent on enslaving Earth, plan to test a device that could put an end to the Animorphs' fight against the Yeerks.
Angels in America
Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is a two-part play by American playwright Tony Kushner. The work won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Tony Award for Best Play, and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play.
Love's fire
Lincoln
Thinking about the longstanding problems of virtue and happiness
In this first collection of writings by Tony Kushner, including his latest play Slavs!, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright grapples with the timeless issues of bigotry, war, faith, love, as well as tackling the contemporary topics as AIDS, gay rights and the moral horrors of the Gulf War.
Brundibar
Aninku and Pepicek find their mother sick one morning. The doctor says they need to buy her milk to make her better, but they have no money. They try to make some by singing in the town square, but a hurdy-gurdy grinder, Brundibar, chases them away. With the help of three talking animals and three hundred schoolchildren, they defeat the bully. Brundibar is based on a Czech opera for children that was performed fifty-five times by the children of Terezin, a Nazi concentration camp in 1943.
A bright room called day
This play follows a group of political activists and artist who struggle to preserve themselves in 1930s Berlin as the Weimar Republic surrenders to fascism.
Slavs!
Slavs!: Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness is a 1994 play by Tony Kushner, set in the USSR as it crumbles and during its later rebirth as a collection of independent states. The play has four acts, beginning in 1985 and ending in 1992.
Angels in America, Part Two
The second half of Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic Angels in America, Perestroika steers the characters introduced in Millennium Approaches from the opportunistic eighties to a new sense of community in the nineties. "Not only a stunning resolution of the resounding human drama of Millennium Approaches, but also a true millennial work of art."--Frank Rich, The New York Times
Caroline, Or Change
Louisiana, 1963: A nation reeling from the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy assassination. Caroline, a black maid, and Noah, the son of the Jewish family she works for, struggle to find an identity for their friendship. Through their intimate story, this beautiful new musical portrays the changing rhythms of a nation. Tony Kushner and composer Jeanine Tesori have created a story that addresses contemporary questions of culture, community, race, and class through the lens and musical pulse of the 1960s.
Angels in America, Part One
Winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Winner of the 1993 Tony Award for Best Play. In the first part of Tony Kushner's epic, set in 1980's New York City, a gay man is abandoned by his lover when he contracts the AIDS virus, and a closeted Mormon lawyer's marriage to his pill-popping wife stalls. Other characters include the infamous McCarthy-ite lawyer Roy Cohn, Ethel Rosenberg, a former drag queen who works as a nurse, and an angel.
Homebody/Kabul
Set in Kabul, this play examines current day Afghanistan, its history, its long long-tortured relationship with the West and its current complex political and humanitarian crisis. As the story unfolds the Homebody, a bored, emotionally imprisoned but wildly intellectual English woman, finds refuge and escape in the alternate world Afghanistan, which she exoticizes in her mind's eye with the help of an out-of-date tourist guide book. Her mysterious disappearance prompts an ensuing search by her ineffectual husband and her emotionally detached daughter, who arrive in the foreign land unprepared for the adventures that await them. In their quest for truth and closure the lines between the real and the unreal, the political and the personal, the public and the private, the psychological and the sociological are intentionally blurred and artfully ambiguous. As in his previous work, Kushner's ability to provoke, entertain, reinvent and reconstitute language is nothing short of astonishing; with Homebody/Kabul, Kushner reaffirms his status as one of the most important and dynamic contemporary dramatists in the world.
A Dybbuk and Other Tales of the Supernatural
The dybbuk, a dead person's soul that possesses a living person, is an ancient and fascinating part of Jewish folklore in Eastern Europe. The stories in this collection, none of which has been translated before, illuminate the different aspects of the Jewish mystical world, including possessions, transmigration, fairy tales, parables and miracles.
