The Theater of Tony Kushner (2^nd Ed.) Living Past Hope

The Theater of Tony Kushner is a comprehensive portrait of the forty-year long career of dramatist Tony Kushner as playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and public intellectual and political activist.

Following an introduction examining the influences of Kushner?s development as an artist, this updated second edition features individual chapters on his major plays, including A Bright Room Called Day, Hydriotaphia, or The Death of Dr. Browne, Angels in America, Slavs! Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness, Homebody/Kabul, Caroline, or Change,and The Intelligent Homosexual?s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, along with chapters on Kushner?s adaptations, one-act plays, and screenplays, including his two Academy Award-nominated screenplays, Munich and Lincoln.

A book for anyone interested in theater, film, literature, and the ways in which the past informs the present, this second edition of The Theater of Tony Kushner explores how his writings reflect key elements of American society, from politics and economics to race, gender, and spirituality, all with the hope of inspiring America to live up to its ideals.

Introduction: The feathers and the mirrors and the smoke 1. Grief pushes outward: Yes Yes No No and other early works 2. Past heaven, through the earth, to hell: A Bright Room Called Day 3. The progress of death in the land of pure delight: Hydriotaphia, or The Death of Dr. Browne 4. Troubling the waters: Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes 5. What is to be done?: Slavs! Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness 6. Marvelous dislocations: Homebody/Kabul 7. Underwater in Louisiana: Caroline, or Change and other musical works 8. You say you want a revolution?: The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures 9. The heart chases memory: Adaptations 10. I’m ready for my close-up: Screenplays 11. An undoing world: Kushner’s one-acts and unproduced work

James Fisher is Professor Emeritus of Theatre at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is recipient of the 2017 Mary Settle Sharp Teaching Excellence Award from UNCG and was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre in 2019.