Tony Kushner
Tony Kushner, born July 16, 1956, is one of the most important American playwrights of the past half-century. Angels in America made him famous. Its two parts won back-to-back Tony Awards for Best Play, and Millennium Approaches won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize.
A Jewish, gay kid in Lake Charles
Kushner was born in Manhattan to two classical musicians: his mother, Sylvia Deutscher, played bassoon, and his father, William Kushner, was a clarinetist and conductor. The family moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana, where they were part of a small Jewish community in the southwestern part of the state. His mother also acted in local theatre. Kushner has described watching her play Linda Loman in Death of a Salesman at the Lake Charles Little Theater as a grade-schooler and being transfixed. He was a champion debater at Lake Charles High School, which helps explain the long, argumentative speeches in his plays.
He realized young that he was gay, and spent years in therapy trying not to be. His father urged him not to “surrender” to it. That history of self-denial echoes through Joe Pitt.
New York, Brecht and Benjamin
Kushner studied medieval literature at Columbia (BA, 1978) and directing at NYU (MFA, 1984). His first major play, A Bright Room Called Day (1985), set a group of friends in Weimar Berlin as Hitler rises and interrupted their story with a 1980s American commentator who compares Reagan to the Nazis. That mix of epic history, direct address and present-day political anger is the template for Angels.
After Angels
His later work includes Slavs!, Homebody/Kabul (written before September 11, 2001, and eerily prescient), Caroline, or Change (2003, with composer Jeanine Tesori) and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures (2009). For film he wrote Spielberg’s Munich, Lincoln, West Side Story and The Fabelmans. He received the National Medal of Arts in 2013 and is one of the few writers nominated for an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony. He lives in Manhattan with his husband, the writer Mark Harris. In 2026 he directed a 40th-anniversary benefit reading of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart at the Public Theater.
(licensed photo only; see the image guide)
Quick facts
- Born July 16, 1956, New York City
- Raised Lake Charles, Louisiana
- Education Columbia (BA 1978), NYU (MFA 1984)
- Major honors Pulitzer Prize (1993); Tony Awards for Best Play (1993, 1994); Emmy (2004); National Medal of Arts (2013); first Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award (2008)
- Documentary Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner, dir. Freida Lee Mock
Inspiration: Where the Play Comes From
Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History”
The play’s central image comes from the German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin. In his 1940 “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” written months before he died fleeing the Nazis, Benjamin describes Paul Klee’s 1920 drawing Angelus Novus, which he owned. He reads it as the angel of history: its face is turned toward the past, which it sees as one pile of wreckage, and a storm from Paradise drives it backward into the future. Benjamin calls that storm “progress.” Kushner’s friend Kimberly Flynn introduced him to Benjamin. Kushner has joked that he is indebted to Benjamin “to the point of larceny.”
Bertolt Brecht and epic theatre
Critics recognized Angels as Brechtian from the start: short scenes, split scenes playing at the same time, actors doubling roles, scene changes in full view and stagecraft that admits it is stagecraft. In his production notes Kushner says the moments of magic should be fully theatrical and it is fine if the wires show. The play wants an audience that feels the story and thinks about it at once, which is Brecht’s goal.
Mormon history and the American imagination
An angel crashing into a young man’s bedroom with a sacred book: for many Americans that image calls up Joseph Smith and the angel Moroni. Kushner used Mormonism as the most American of religions, born in upstate New York, built on migration and revelation. A Mormon literary critic once called the play the most sustained treatment of Mormonism on Broadway since 1914.
Roy Cohn: the real villain
Cohn embodied what Kushner wanted to dramatize: a closeted gay man who used the machinery of power, from McCarthyism to Reagan-era fixing, against people like himself, and who died of AIDS while denying it. Kushner calls the character a dramatic fiction and notes in the script that Roy’s words are his inventions, not documented statements.
A dream, and a commission
Kushner has said the play began with a dream. Oskar Eustis, who admired A Bright Room Called Day, helped him get a commission from San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre. The original pitch was far smaller. What arrived years later was two long plays with five gay men, two women, an Angel and no songs.
Read more
Isaac Butler and Dan Kois, The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America (2018), an oral history drawing on more than 250 interviews. Kushner’s own afterwords and production notes in the TCG edition. Charles McNulty, “Angels in America: Tony Kushner’s Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Modern Drama (1996).
Notable Productions
The play’s early life spanned four cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, London and New York. Much of its reputation was built in London before it reached Broadway.
Mark Taper Forum workshop
The first public showing of Millennium Approaches, in May 1990. Oskar Eustis had become an associate artistic director at the Taper the year before.
Eureka Theatre: world premiere
The company that commissioned the play staged a full Millennium Approaches on almost no money and showed Perestroika as a work in progress. One company member later said the effort essentially ended the Eureka as a producing company.
Royal National Theatre
Declan Donnellan’s production in the small Cottesloe theatre brought the play its first international acclaim. Perestroika followed in 1993. Donnellan remembered many audience members with AIDS attending, and how harrowing it was for them.
Mark Taper Forum: both parts
Perestroika had its official premiere on November 8, 1992, playing alongside Millennium Approaches.
Walter Kerr Theatre
Directed by George C. Wolfe and opened May 4, 1993, with Stephen Spinella as Prior and Ron Leibman as Roy. Both parts won the Tony for Best Play, and Millennium Approaches won the Pulitzer.
Mike Nichols’s film
Kushner adapted his own script. Al Pacino played Roy, Meryl Streep played Hannah, Ethel and the Rabbi, Emma Thompson played the Angel, Jeffrey Wright played Belize and Mary-Louise Parker played Harper. It won 11 Emmys from 21 nominations and swept every major category.
The opera
Hungarian composer Peter Eötvös turned the play into an opera.
Signature Theatre revival
The first major New York revival, directed by Michael Greif (director of Rent). It brought the play to a new generation.
National Theatre revival
Directed by Marianne Elliott, with Andrew Garfield as Prior and Nathan Lane as Roy. The Angel was moved by puppeteers known as “Angel Shadows.” On Broadway at the Neil Simon Theatre (March–July 2018) it received a record 11 Tony nominations for a play and won three, including Best Revival, with Tonys for Garfield and Lane.
Invictus Theatre Company
One cast performed both parts in repertory, June to September 2025, and the run was extended.
Rec Room Arts
Both parts in rotating repertory in a 60-seat downtown space, November 6 to December 20, 2025. A recent Houston take on the play.
[Our production]
[One or two sentences on your production’s concept.]