Angels in America (42 page)

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.