Tony Kushner

After my mother died, in 1990, I felt a kind of bafflement. There is simply no way to comprehend the vanishing of this person. The first night after the funeral, I had a dream—it was raining outside and she was sitting on her grave in her nightgown, just getting soaked to the skin, and I had to go and find the cemetery. I think that’s how I came up with the idea of the homebody disappearing.
-Tony Kushner, Paris Review


When I’m writing a new play, there’s a period where I know I shouldn’t be out in public much. I imagine most people who create go through something like this. You willfully loosen some of the inner straps that hold your core together. You become more porous and multivalent and multivocal, so that the multitudes you have inside yourself can start to get up and walk around and emerge. Then, hopefully, you put them back into the cave. But to really play Linda Loman, you have to go there every night. So you live in a state, I would imagine, of permanent looseness in the core, which I find frankly terrifying.

I’ve become close friends with very few actors. They are of course dazzling people and I need them to do my work. When I meet a new actor with whom I want to work, it’s like discovering a new color. But I’ve always had an instinct of maintaining a certain distance from actors, because I find them uncanny and unnerving.

Sometimes a phony-baloney actor will hoodwink the public for decades, but the actors we really revere aren’t kidding around when they act. They suffer. Part of what we are paying to see when we go to the theater is suffering. We want to see actual suffering. There’s a certain Christ-like thing going on—the actors are suffering so we don’t have to.
-Tony Kushner, Paris Review


When you’re just starting to write a play, you don’t know who these people are, so you just have to listen. They’re singing a song through you, and if you can hear their melodies, then you have something to start to work with.
-Tony Kushner, Paris Review


But production is also the great thing about being a playwright. When your work is reasonably close to completion, you get to go into a room full of wonderful people who will then help you continue to write your play. The solitude of novelists and poets and nonfiction prose writers is a terribly frightening thing for me to contemplate. Actors and directors make my life so much easier, and even sometimes happier. The only problem is that, as my friend George Wolfe always says, a playwright has to be able to know when it’s time to leave the party. Rehearsal rooms are hotbeds of suffering and agony and joy and sex, or at least eroticism and excitement, and you can get very caught up in them. It’s hard to leave and go back and be alone with a blank page. This is something that every writer, playwright or otherwise, goes through. But as a playwright I don’t think you quite develop the same talent for solitude that poets and novelists do.

I wish I were a poet

. . . it’s the most important writing. The greatest writers are the great poets. When you bury your head in poetry, it has all the mind-exploding power of serious philosophy, but it’s also music. As a child of musicians, I find rhythm and melody very important.
-Tony Kushner, Paris Review


I found a line in Glenway Wescott’s journals that’s become my mantra - “A day’s work every day now. Now, now, now!”
-Tony Kushner, Paris Review