Tony Winner Kushner Writing "Big, New Gay Play"

By Andrew Gans
10 Oct 2006

Tony Kushner
Tony Kushner
photo by Stephen Goldblatt/HBO

Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner — whose musical with Jeanine Tesori, Caroline, or Change, begins London previews Oct. 11 — is at work on a new gay-themed play.

In a forthcoming article, Kushner tells Playbill.com London correspondent John Nathan, "I'm also working on a big, new gay play. It’s been a long time since I’ve written about gay issues. I guess I feel that corners have been turned for me personally and also for the [gay] community and we’re in a different, though unfortunately, not improved era."

Kushner's most-honored work, Angels in America, could also be described a "big gay play." Angels, which is arguably Kushner's masterpiece to date, interweaves the stories of a gay couple split apart by AIDS; a Mormon couple separated by their secret fantasies; and a legendary lawyer fading into history.

Kushner won back-to-back Tony Awards for the two-part epic Angels in America. The first half, Millennium Approaches, won the 1993 Best Play Tony and the second, Perestroika, was awarded the 1994 Best Play prize. His other works include A Bright Room Called Day, Slavs!: Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness, Henry Box Brown, The Mirror of Slavery and Homebody/Kabul.

Kushner also told Nathan that he is working on a screenplay about the late playwright Eugene O'Neill.