Playwright Kushner Rescheduled to Visit UNCG Dec. 3

By Michelle Hines, University Relations

Contact: (336) 334-5371

Posted 11-14-08

GREENSBORO — Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner, who penned the groundbreaking theatrical opus “Angels in America,” will visit UNCG Wednesday, Dec. 3.

Kushner was initially scheduled to come to UNCG in October but had to postpone due to an emergency.

At the invitation of the UNCG’s Department of Theatre Kushner will take part in a question and answer session beginning at 7:30 p.m. in Taylor Theatre. The Q&A session is free and open to the public, but tickets are required. Obtain them by calling (336) 334-4392.

Jim Fisher, theatre department head, will ask questions, and Kushner will also take questions from the audience. Fisher has a working relationship with Kushner and is the author of a new book about Kushner’s work, “Understanding Tony Kushner.”

Kushner’s plays are “invariably political” but “rarely polemical,” says John Lahr, writing in the New Yorker. “He gives voice to characters who have been rendered powerless by the forces of circumstances – a drag queen dying of AIDS, an uneducated Southern maid, contemporary Afghans – and his attempt to see all sides of their predicament has a sly subversiveness. He forces the audience to identify with the marginalized – a humanizing act of the imagination.”

Born in New York City in 1956, and raised in Lake Charles, La., Kushner is best known for “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia On National Themes.” His other plays include “A Bright Room Called Day,” “Slavs!,” “Hydriotaphia,” “Homebody/Kabul” and “Caroline, or Change.” He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols’ HBO film of “Angels in America” and Steven Spielberg’s “Munich.”

Kushner has won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an Emmy Award, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, an Oscar nomination, an Arts Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Spirit of Justice Award from the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders and a Cultural Achievement Award from The National Foundation for Jewish Culture.

He is the subject of a documentary film, “Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner,” made by the Oscar-winning filmmaker Freida Lee Mock. He is currently working on a screenplay about Abraham Lincoln.