Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Revised and Complete Edition (41 page)

From the beginning Kimberly was my teacher. Though largely self-taught, she was more widely read and she helped me understand both Freud and Marx. She introduced me to the writers of the Frankfurt School and their early attempts at synthesizing psychoanalysis and Marxism; and to the German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin, whose importance for me rests primarily in his introduction into these “scientific” disciplines a Kabbalist-inflected mysticism and a dark, apocalyptic spirituality.

As both writer and talker Kimberly employs a rich variety of rhetorical strategies and effects, even while expressing deep emotion. She identifies this as an Irish trait; it’s evident in O’Neill, Yeats, Beckett. This relationship to language, blended with Jewish and gay versions of the same strategies, is evident in my plays, in the ways my characters speak.

More pessimistic than I, Kimberly is much less afraid to look at the ugliness of the world. She tries to protect herself far less than I do, and consequently she sees more. She feels safest, she says, knowing the worst, while most people I know, myself included, would rather be spared and feel safer encircled by a measure of obliviousness. She’s capable of pulling things apart, teasing out fundamental concerns from their camouflage; at the same time she uses her analysis, her learning, her emotions, her lived experience, to make imaginative leaps, to see the deeper connections between ideas and historical developments. Through her example I learned to trust that such leaps can be made; I learned to admire them, in literature, in theory, in the utterances people make in newspapers. And certainly it was in part her example that made the labor of synthesizing disparate, seemingly unconnected things become for me the process of writing a play.

Since the accident Kimberly has struggled with her health, and I have struggled to help her, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing; and it doesn’t take much more than a passing familiarity with
Angels
to see how my life and my plays match up. It’s always been easier talking about the way in which I used what we’ve lived through to write
Angels
, even though I sometimes question the morality of the act (while at the same time considering it unavoidable if I was to write at all), than it has been acknowledging the intellectual debt. People seem to be more interested in the story of the accident and its aftermath than in the intellectual genealogy, the emotional life
being privileged over the intellectual life in the business of making plays, and the two being regarded, incorrectly, as separable. A great deal of what I understand about health issues comes from what Kimberly has endured and triumphed over, and the ways she’s articulated those experiences. But
Angels
is more the result of our intellectual friendship than it is autobiography. Her contribution was as contributor, teacher, editor, adviser, not muse.

Perhaps other playwrights don’t have similar relationships or similar debts; perhaps they have. In a wonderful, recently published collection of essays on creative partnerships, entitled
Significant Others
, edited by Isabelle de Courtivron and Whitney Chadwick, the contributors examine both healthy and deeply unhealthy versions of artistic interdependence in such couples as the Delaunays, Kahlo and Rivera, Hammett and Hellman, and Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg—and in doing so strike forcefully at what the editors call “the myth of solitariness.”

We have no words for the people to whom we are indebted. I call Oskar Eustis a dramaturg, sometimes a collaborator; but collaborator implies co-authorship and nobody knows what “dramaturg” implies.
Angels
, I wrote in the published version of
Perestroika
, began in a conversation, real and imaginary, with Oskar Eustis. A romantic-ambivalent love for American history and belief in what one of the play’s characters calls “the prospect of some sort of radical democracy spreading outward and growing up” are things Oskar and I share, part of the discussions we had for nearly a year before I started writing
Millennium
. Oskar continues to be for me, intellectually and emotionally, what the developmental psychologists call “a secure base of attachment” (a phrase I learned from Kimberly).

The play is indebted, too, to writers I’ve never met. It’s ironical that Harold Bloom, in his introduction to Olivier Revault d’Allonnes’
Musical Variations on Jewish Thought
, provided me with a translation of the Hebrew word for “blessing”—“more life”—which subsequently became key to the heart of
Perestroika
. Harold Bloom is also the author of
The Anxiety of Influence
, his oedipalization of the history of Western literature, which when I first encountered it years ago made me so anxious my analyst suggested I put it away. Recently I had the chance to meet Professor Bloom and, guilty over my appropriation of “more life,” I fled from the encounter as one of Freud’s
Totem and Taboo
tribesmen might flee from a meeting with that primal father, the one with the big knife. (I cite Bloom as the source of the idea in the published script.)

Guilt plays a part in this confessional account; and I want the people who helped me make this play to be identified, because their labor was consequential. I have been blessed with remarkable comrades and collaborators: Together we organize the world for ourselves, or at least we organize our understanding of it; we reflect it, refract it, criticize it, grieve over its savagery and help each other to discern, amidst the gathering dark, paths of resistance, pockets of peace and places whence hope may be plausibly expected. Marx was right: The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs. And also plays.

GLORIA WEGNER

T
ONY
K
USHNER’S
other plays include
A Bright Room Called Day; Hydriotaphia, or The Death of Dr. Brown; The Illusion
, adapted from the play by Pierre Corneille;
Slavs!
;
Homebody/Kabul
;
Caroline, or Change
, a musical with composer Jeanine Tesori; and
The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures
. His translations include S. Y. Ansky’s
The Dybbuk
; Bertolt Brecht’s
The Good Person of Sezuan
and
Mother Courage and Her Children
; and the libretto for Hans Krása and Adolf Hoffmeister’s
Brundibár
, a children’s opera for which he wrote a curtain-raiser,
But the Giraffe!
He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols’s film of
Angels in America
and for Steven Spielberg’s
Munich
and
Lincoln
.

His books include
The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present; Brundibar
, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak; and
Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
, co-edited with Alisa Solomon.

Among many honors, Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, two Evening Standard Awards, an Olivier Award, an Emmy Award, two Oscar nominations, and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama.

He lives in Manhattan with his husband, Mark Harris.