(Charles McGrath’s article appeared in The New York Times, 3/7; via Pam Green.)
In characteristic fashion, Tony Kushner is doing too many things at once these days, and he’s late with a lot of them. In one more or less typical stretch last month, he was sorting through 60 boxes of his papers, inhaling dust mites in the process; working on a screenplay for Brad Pitt and finishing another, a new version of “West Side Story,” for Steven Spielberg; debating whether to rewrite his first play, “A Bright Room Called Day”; pondering one that might or might not turn out to be about President Trump; finishing the second act of an opera he is writing with Jeanine Tesori about the death of Eugene O’Neill; and vigilantly attending rehearsals of the National Theater’s revival of “Angels in America,”starring Andrew Garfield and Nathan Lane, which has moved from London to Broadway, where it opens March 25 at the Neil Simon Theater.
“It’s too much,” he said, sitting in his office in a subbasement in the West Village. Mr. Kushner, 61, is tall — surely the tallest major American playwright since Arthur Miller — and youthful-looking, and speaks softly but rapidly, as if rushing to keep up with a runaway brain. “But it feels to me like my life works this way,” he went on. “The more time feels open and unconstrained, the less realistic I am, and I start to get distracted by a million stupid things. I’ve always gotten everything I’ve done in a sort of terribly pressured situation that I create for myself, usually because I missed three deadlines and it’s clear that if I miss one more I’ll be fired.”
Photo: The New York Times
