Kushner, Tony (k

sh`nər), 1956–, American playwright, b. New York City. Educated at Columbia and New York Univ., he was a little-known off-Broadway playwright with several interesting works, e.g., Yes, Yes, No, No (1985) and A Bright Room Called Day (1987), to his credit when his Angels in America (1991–92) burst on the theatrical scene. This two-part, seven-hour, Pulitzer Prize– and Tony-winning drama of life in the age of AIDS AIDS or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, fatal disease caused by a rapidly mutating retrovirus that attacks the immune system and leaves the victim vulnerable to infections, malignancies, and neurological disorders.
..... Click the link for more information. mingles the political, personal, and universal in its treatment of such apparently disparate elements as gay and straight relationships, the Mormon faith, Roy Cohn, Ethel Rosenberg (see Rosenberg Case Rosenberg Case, in U.S. history, a lengthy and controversial espionage case. In 1950, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Julius Rosenberg (1918–53), an electrical engineer who had worked (1940–45) for the U.S.
..... Click the link for more information. ), disease, love, and death. The play was adapted into an Emmy-winning television drama (2002), directed by Mike Nichols Nichols, Mike, 1931–, American actor and director, b. Berlin, Germany, as Michael Igor Peschkowsky. He and his family emigrated to the United States in 1939, and he studied (1950–53) at the Univ. of Chicago.
..... Click the link for more information. . Hailed as a major talent, Kushner has been praised for his intelligence, wit, and humanity. Since Angels he has written Slavs! (1994), an ironic political fantasia; Homebody/Kabul (2001), a linguistically rich drama centered about an imaginary and a real Afghanistan; and Caroline, or Change (2004), a semiautobiographical musical that focuses on issues of race and class.

Inspired by a 1942 Czech opera performed by children at the Theresienstadt concentration camp, Kushner supplied the text for the children's book Brundibar and the libretto for the opera (both: 2003) based on it; Maurice Sendak Sendak, Maurice Bernard, 1928–, American writer and illustrator of children's books, b. Brooklyn, N.Y. His beautifully drawn, wildly imaginative, often fantastic, and sometimes controversial illustrations appear in dozens of children's books, including
..... Click the link for more information. illustrated the book and designed the opera production. The two also collaborated on a version of Martinů Martinů, Bohuslav (bô`h
..... Click the link for more information. 's 1937 opera Comedy on the Bridge. Kushner has also made contemporary translations of two plays by Bertolt Brecht Brecht, Bertolt (bĕr`tôlt brĕkht), 1898–1956, German dramatist and poet, b. Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht.
..... Click the link for more information. , Good Person of Setzuan (1994) and Mother Courage and Her Children (2006).

Bibliography

See R. Vorlicky, ed., Tony Kushner in Conversation (1998); studies by P. Brask, ed. (1995), D. R. Geis and S. F. Kruger, ed. (1997), J. Fisher (2001), and H. Bloom, ed. (2005).

Kushner, Tony

(born July 16, 1956, New York, N.Y., U.S.) U.S. dramatist. He grew up in Lake Charles, La., and attended Columbia University and New York University. His early plays include Yes, Yes, No, No (1985). His major work, Angels in America, consists of two lengthy plays that deal with political issues and the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. The first part, Millennium Approaches (1991), won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for best play; the second, Perestroika (1992), also won a Tony Award for best play. Later works include Slavs (1995), Henry Box Brown (1997), and the controversial Homebody/Kabul (2001), which addresses the relationship between Afghanistan and the West.