Roy Zipstein photo

Tony Kushner loves him some Lincoln.

Connecticut Forum:
"Storytellers and the Stories They Tell"

Nov. 21, The Bushnell Center for Performing Arts, 166 Capitol Ave., 987-6000, bushnell.org.

Playwright and public intellectual Tony Kushner will be joined by playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and David Simon (creator of "The Wire") at Friday's Connecticut Forum on storytelling at the Bushnell. The Advocate recently caught up with Kushner by phone in Los Angeles.

Advocate: When did you first fall in love with
theater?

Kushner: I have two very early memories of theater. My mother was a really great bassoonist who didn't have many opportunities to play in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where I grew up. She channeled her artistic talents into acting. I was like 5 years old when I saw her do Linda Loman in Death of a Salesman. It was done in the round — very cutting edge in Louisiana in 1961 — so you could see the audience right across from you. I remember watching my mother's best friend, who was also my Sunday School teacher, weeping. I was awestruck. It wasn't the story of the play — that was over my head — but the emotions she was calling up in the audience. My mother was trafficking in some kind of magical power.

About the same time my Aunt Martha took me to the first children's play I'd ever seen, a Hans Christian Anderson story. That was calibrated for kids and I totally got it and I adored it.

Those experiences were formative and showed me that theater was about ideas and emotions. In theater, those two things go hand in hand and that's why it's so great.

You've said that hope is a "moral obligation." What helps you stay hopeful?

That's an easier question to answer after the election than it was before. I don't think hope is a feeling state. Hope is an active choice that we make. I believe that you look as hard as you can at reality and try to ascertain where change is possible and then work for that as hard as you can. That's what hope is. It's not wishing. It's not feeling happy. There are drugs you can take for that when you get up in the morning and if you need those, then by all means take them.

What's your current project?

I'm working on a movie about Abraham Lincoln that Stephen Spielberg's directing; I'm in LA to meet with him. I've been working on the screenplay for two and a half years. It's based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's The Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. It's our second film together and I'm very happy to be working with him again.

The first film you did together, Munich, came in for lots of criticism. How do you manage that?

With a subject like the Middle East, there's no way to avoid controversy. The film did what I hoped. It caused a big, genuinely significant conversation. Together with historical events like the Lebanon war it created a new degree of critical thinking in a less cartoonish, in a less black-and-white way. So all the arguing and fighting was great. And I am enormously proud of it as a work of art. It's rich and dense and difficult. I had a Bangladeshi cab driver in LA who told me he liked the film a lot as a Muslim. I'm glad about that.

What are you reading right now?

Let's see. I'm reading my 967,000th book about Abraham Lincoln. And I'm reading Outwitting History by Aaron Lansky, which is the story of the founding of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst. It's a really beautiful little book. And I'm reading a novel by Norman Rush called Mating.

Are there any talismans or rituals you use when you are writing? Chocolate?

Chocolate for everything! Writing is very, very hard for me; it's very anxiety-making. At times in my life I've consumed immense amounts of chocolate. But I'm 52 years old now and I can't do that any more; it's not healthy. I love riding my bike all over New York. It makes me a little tired and takes away the edge of the anxiety.

I've started to work in the same room with another writer. We both have to show up at the same time every day like a job and someone else knows whether I'm at my desk or not and that really helps. For some reason, when I write plays I use a pen and when I write screenplays I use a laptop.

And when you're stuck?

The hardest thing for me to remember is that if you're stuck you put a character's name down at the top of the page and start writing gibberish. As long as you're in there moving words around something will start to happen. The great danger is to run away and go shopping instead or read a novel or nap. It's very much like an aerobic activity. If you're on the treadmill every day, it's way easier than if you take time off.

Do you have an urge to write an open letter to Obama now, as Alice Walker has done?

I did that years ago in the Clinton administration and I did it once to the Pope after Matthew Shepard was murdered. Apart from being extremely happy that Obama won, I haven't felt compelled to weigh in.

In a way I feel like my open letter to Obama is going to be the Abraham Lincoln script. The timing is breathtaking. 2009 is the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth. They both launched political careers from Illinois. Obama's meteoric rise in a time of danger also parallels Lincoln.

It's too early to say that Obama is truly deserving to be called Lincolnian because there is no higher praise one can give any human being, I think, really. But temperamentally, intellectually, politically and even artistically — Obama's an extraordinarily good writer, and Lincoln was as good a writer as Melville or Whitman, at least by the time he wrote the Second Inaugural Address — there are resemblances. So maybe Obama will even arrive there.

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