Kushner Making a Living as a Playwright, Not.

Thank you to our friends at Colab and Stagesource for picking this one as it hit the blogosphere last week.   If Tony Kushner can't make a living as a playwright,  how could we?

Read more here.











And if you're interested in the book Outrageous Fortune.  Pick it up here.  (A review of this book will be forthcoming on this blog as part of our summer reading list. There's a summer reading list?  There is now.)

CUNY Reverses Course, Grants Honorary Degree to Kushner

Following up on the theatre news from last week when CUNY decided not to award Tony Kushner an honorary degree due to his political views. It appears they've changed their mind!

On Monday, May 2, the trustees for the City University of New York voted to rescind an offer of an honorary degree to playwright Tony Kushner after Trustee Jeffrey S. Weisenfeld claimed that Kushner had been overly critical of Israel and supported a boycott of Israel. Kushner replied with an open letter to the CUNY claiming he had been “publicly defamed,” attacking Weisenfeld’s characterization of his political views, and asking for an apology for the “careless way in which my name and reputation were handled.” Facing mounting pressure from the CUNY faculty union, donors and other honorary degree holders, the CUNY trustees reversed the decision on Monday, May 9, and elected to award Kushner the degree...(read more from Stage Directions News)

Top Theatre News: Tony Kushner denied honorary degree from CUNY due to Israel/ Palestine views

Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright, Tony Kushner, has openly criticized Israeli politics and has supported Palestinian rights. CUNY Trustees are less than thrilled.

Read Tony Kushner's response to CUNY's decision.

The Headline on today's Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman

The angel is in the details...

As a follow-up to my post earlier this week about Angels in America, read Ben Brantley's review of Signature Theatre's revival here.

Read others' thoughts on Angels -- including playwrights Tony Kushner, Christopher Shinn, Sarah Ruhl and Romulus Linney -- on the Signature Theatre blog, too!

In case you missed it...

Ellen McLaughlin and Stephen Spinella

...an article from yesterday's New York Times about the enduring impact of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, and the play's current revival at Signature Theatre.

I share this because Angels is a play that continues to inspire me to write. It's everything, really -- the complete theatrical package, full of big and small moments that are funny, sad, bombastic, beautiful, brutal, political, fantastical, and true. No matter how many times I read it or see it, it is always soul-stirring. When I was an undergrad, I carried around my copy of Millennium Approaches long after I finished reading it, like Linus with his blanket. (And later, watching the inimitable Kathleen Chalfant deliver that opening monologue from my seat in the second row of the Walter Kerr Theatre -- feeling like she was talking to me -- still stands as one of the most breathtaking theatrical memories of my life.)

Read the article here