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.

A collection of writings from the Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angels in America. This volume by Tony Kushner features the play Slavs!, a “comic, mordant and marvelously provocative” look at the crumbling of the Soviet Union (SF Chronicle), as well as several essays, two poems and a prayer.

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.

The Theater of Tony Kushner is a comprehensive portrait of the life and work of one of America's most important contemporary playwrights.

August Wilson penned his first play after seeing a man shot to death. Horton Foote began writing plays to create parts for himself as an actor. Edward Albee faced commercial pressures to modify his scripts-and resisted. After Wit, Margaret Edson swore off playwriting altogether and decided to keep her day job as a kindergarten teacher, instead. The Playwright's Muse presents never-before-published interviews with some of the greatest names of American drama-all recent winners of the Pulitzer Prize. In these scintillating exchanges with eleven leading dramatists, we learn about their inspirations and begin to grasp how the creative process works in the mind of a writer. We learn how their first plays took shape, how it felt to read their first reviews, and what keeps them writing for theater today. Introductory essays on each playwright's life and work, written by theater artists and scholars with strong professional relationships to their subjects, provide additional insight into the writers' contributions to contemporary theater.

The book is an insightful and thorough examination of one of the most prominent political dramatists in the US today, Tony Kushner, and his theatricalization of politics. Moreover, it draws heavily on Kushner’s wide range of themes and techniques. As such, it will be beneficial for graduate students and scholars who are concerned with the realm of contemporary American drama at the threshold of the twenty-first century. In addition, the book will appeal to anyone who wants a deeper understanding of Kushner and his major influences such as Bertolt Brecht, and will also be valuable for readers with a general interest in American drama. This book is primarily concerned with exploring and analyzing political discourse as dramatized in the work of Tony Kushner. The author’s point of departure is the concept of political theatre as developed by Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht. This theoretical exploration serves a double purpose: first, it is meant to provide a statement of the definitions and concepts central to this study, such as political discourse, political theatre, and postmodern theatre; second, it offers the tools of analysis by which to read and analyze Tony Kushner’s postmodern, politically-oriented texts. Through this, the book defines the major features of Kushner’s postmodern theatre and explores how he theatricalizes politics. American drama in the 1980s and the 1990s witnessed a noticeable thematic shift from the exclusively personal plays and musicals that once dominated American theatre for a long period of time to an increasing number of plays which put greater emphasis on exploring issues and questions of socio-political interest. As a result of this thematic shift, the predominantly private settings and familial character relationships of the traditional family play have been replaced by a great variety of public settings and non-familial characters. Tony Kushner’s theatre is a pioneering attempt in this respect. In Kushner’s theatre, there is no room for the traditional family plays which dominated the American stage in the 1960s and 1970s. Kushner has found that there is not enough political discourse in contemporary American Theatre. For this reason, he writes his plays to shed special light on the politics of American society in the 1980s, the 1990s, and in the beginnings of the 21st century.