Tony Kushner Selected Works

An evening-length presentation of Tony Kushner's shorter works, first presented together at the Guthrie. Includes the plays Flip Flop Fly!, Terminating or Sonnet LXXV or "Lass Meine Schmerzen Nicht Verloren Sein" or Ambivalence, East Coast Ode to Howard Jarvis, Dr. Arnold A. Hutschnecker in Paradise, and Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy.

The title of Tony Kushner's play is 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, 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. With humor and passion, the play examines the importance of connectedness and belonging—to a family, a community, a group, an ideology, a marriage—and what happens when those connections are lost.

The Henry Box Brown Play, set in England’'s industrial north in the 1850s, is based on the true story of a Virginian slave who found his way to freedom by shipping himself in a box delivered into the hands of Philadelphian abolitionists. Brown made a career for himself touring Great Britain in a musicalized version of his story, while promoting a boycott of Southern cotton. Kushner’'s play explores the repercussions of one particular performance in the Northern mill town of Todmorden, when Brown'’s extraordinary entertainment excites an unpredictable outburst of political passion. The play, which Kushner began working on in the 90's, was first staged in 2010 by graduate acting students at NYU.

Berlin. 1932. A group of artists and communists throw a decadent party to celebrate the coming new year. But as the country succumbs to the seduction of Nazism they are forced to choose between integrity and survival. Shocking and provocative, the play caused a sensation when it was first performed. From Pulitzer-prize winning playwright Tony Kushner, A Bright Room Called Day examines the darkest reaches of the human heart.

A lawyer, facing mortality, desperate to find the son he drove away years before, travels in the dead of night to a mysterious cave. There he engages the services of a wizard, who conjures up visions of the romantic, adventurous, perilous life the lawyer'’s son has been living since his father expelled him from home. The Illusion, freely adapted from Pierre Corneille'’s L'’Illusion Comique, is Kushner’s most joyfully theatrical play, a wildly entertaining tale of passion and regret, of love, disillusionment, and magic.

Leaving the familiar world of New York, Kushner transports us to Russia circa 1985 at the beginning of Perestroika, and takes us through the fall of the Soviet empire in 1991. Along the way, we encounter leaping Bolsheviks, drunken lesbians, wandering children, and even a Babushka or two. Both brilliantly funny and timelessly sad, Tony Kushner's thoughtful play isn't afraid to ask the eternal questions, while laughing at the presumption of such a task.

Considered by many to be the greatest Yiddish drama, A Dybbuk recounts the tale of a wealthy man'’s daughter possessed by the spirit of her dead beloved. This volume features Tony Kushner'’s remarkable, imaginative adaptation of S. Ansky's original play, along with an afterword by Harold Bloom. Also included is a selection of stories, fairy tales and parables translated into English for the first time by Joachim Neugroschel, illuminating many aspects of the Jewish mystical world, including possessions, transmigration parables and miracles.

Kushner's wild intellectual comedy chronicles the last hours in the life of Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), an English physician and writer known for the richness of his prose and his attempt to reconcile Christian values with scientific knowledge. As the great man wanes, he must deal with not just his wife and amanuensis, but also his Soul and Death, not to mention a love-struck gravedigger, a stuttering preacher, and a trio of ranters, among the cast of 15. Each character has an all-important agenda and is single-minded in the pursuit of it in a "fabulous" world that spans heaven and earth, the metaphysical and the mundane, the bawdy and the beatific.

The play has been collected in an edition alongside a number of short works, on which Kushner has written: "This is an odd assemblage of plays, for which gathering-together there is no overarching thematic justification. Because several of the plays deal with death, and one of the death-plays deals as well with money, and the last play deals with taxation, we're calling the book Death & Taxes. But all plays, directly or indirectly, are about death and taxes, so this title explains little . . . "

Louisiana, 1963: A nation reeling from the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy assassination. Caroline, a black maid, and Noah, the son of the Jewish family she works for, struggle to find an identity for their friendship. Through their intimate story, this beautiful new musical portrays the changing rhythms of a nation. Tony Kushner and composer Jeanine Tesori have created a story that addresses contemporary questions of culture, community, race and class through the lens and musical pulse of the 1960s.

In the late 90s, a bored, emotionally imprisoned but wildly intellectual English woman called the Homebody, flees to Afghanistan, a place that she romanticizes with the help of a tourist guidebook. Her mysterious disappearance prompts a search by her husband and daughter who arrive in the foreign land unprepared for the adventures and contradictions that await them. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America, has turned his penetrating gaze to the arena of global politics to create this suspenseful portrait of a dangerous collision between cultures.