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Lecture

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Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner: 2009 Chicago Tribune Literary Prize

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ABOUT 

  • ABOUT Chris Jones

    Chris Jones is the chief theater critic for the Chicago Tribune. He has reviewed and commented on culture and politics for the Tribune for more than a decade and writes a weekly column on culture and the arts. Before joining the Tribune, Jones served as Midwestern theater critic for Variety and Daily Variety, publishing hundreds of theater reviews with an emphasis on pre-Broadway tryouts. He has covered theater in cities across the United States, including time as Variety's Broadway critic. Profile

  • ABOUT Tony Kushner

    Tony Kushner’s plays include A Bright Room Called Day; Angels in America, Parts One and Two; Slavs!; Homebody/Kabul; and Caroline, or Change. He has written adaptations of Pierre Corneille’s L’Illusion Comique; S. Ansky's A Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds; and Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Sezuan and Mother Courage and Her Children. The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures premiered in 2009. Kushner has won the Pulitzer Prize, an Emmy Award, two Tony Awards, and many other accolades.

    Profile
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I feel that it’s been a catastrophe for the country that progressive people, people of the left, have abandoned the belief that you can achieve progress through government.       

Click play to listen. Recorded on November 8, 2009.

On November 8, 2009, the Festival hosted the Chicago Tribune’s presentation of its Literary Prize to playwright Tony Kushner. This annual prize is part of the Chicago Tribune’s ongoing dedication to reading, writing, and ideas.

All proceeds from this program benefitted the Chicago Tribune Holiday Campaign, a campaign of Chicago Tribune Charities, a McCormick Foundation Fund.

Teachers Guide

The Chicago Humanities Festival has prepared a teachers' guide for this program. Download the study guide for this program now.

Tags

politics, Chicago Tribune, Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, Munich, drama, literature, playwright

Tony Kushner, Staunch Progressive

Prolific playwright Tony Kushner has challenged unjust authority since leafleting the Ku Klux Klan and refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance because it mentioned God during his childhood in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He has earned a reputation as an outspoken literary figure and, in the vein of Arthur Miller, has insisted through his writing and his public voice on the playwright’s role as political provocateur. In this conversation with Tribune theater critic Chris Jones, Kushner discusses his political beliefs and the plays they have inspired. Currently at work adapting Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals (2005) for an upcoming Steven Spielberg film, Kushner feels Abraham Lincoln’s influence in many of his assessments of the present political landscape. He contextualizes the history of the formerly progressive Republican Party, ponders Lincoln’s malleable reputation and political heirs, and provocatively compares and contrasts the American South from Reconstruction onward to Japan and Germany after those nations’ defeat in World War II. An opponent of whimsical political attention spans and believer in the utility of spirituality, Kushner espouses on international relations, the United States’ role therein, and how theater can serve these causes.

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