1956-07-16

TONY KUSHNER, American playwright, born; Kushner seized the New York theater scene by the throat with his play Angels in America and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Angels… is a play in two parts. The first entitled Millennium Approaches, and the second is entitled Perestroika. Other plays include Hydrotaphia, Slavs!: Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness, A Bright Room Called Day, Homebody/Kabul, and the book for the musical Caroline, or Change. His translation of Bertoldt Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children was performed at the Delacorte Theater in the summer of 2006 starring Meryl Streep and directed by George C. Wolfe.

In April 2003 he and his long-time partner, Entertainment Weekly editor Mark Harris, were wed in a ceremony in New York. His play The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With A Key to the Scriptures was inspired by two 19th century thinkers and their works — George Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism and Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. The play looks at the life of a 20th century thinker, a retired longshoreman, Gus Marcantonio, who’s feeling confused and defeated by the 21st century. In summer 2007, he invites his sister and his three children (who in turn bring along spouses, ex-spouses, lovers and more) to a most unusual family reunion in their Brooklyn brownstone.

In the early 2000s, Kushner began writing for film. His co-written screenplay Munich was produced and directed by Steven Spielberg in 2005. In January 2006, a documentary feature about Kushner entitled Wrestling with Angels debuted at the Sundance Festival.  He worked with Spielberg again, writing the screenplay for an adaptation of historian Doris Goodwin Kearns’s book Team of Rivals. The screenplay for Lincoln would receive multiple awards, in addition to nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Golden Globes and the Oscars.