Kushner's best known work is Angels in America (a play in two parts: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika), a seven-hour epic about the AIDS epidemic in Reagan-era New York, which was later adapted into a miniseries for which Kushner wrote the screenplay. His other plays include Hydriotaphia, 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 new translation of Bertolt 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. Kushner has also adapted Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan, Corneille's The Illusion, and S. Ansky's play The Dybbuk.
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 Film Festival. The film was directed by Freida Lee Mock. In April 2011 it was announced that he is currently working with Spielberg again, writing the screenplay for an adaptation of historian Doris Kearns Goodwin‘s book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.
Kushner is famous for frequent revisions and years-long gestations of his plays. Both Angels in America: Perestroika and Homebody/Kabul were significantly revised even after they were first published. Kushner has admitted that the original script version of Angels in America: Perestroika is nearly double the length of the theatrical version.[4] His newest completed work, the play The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, began as a novel more than a decade ago.
The book to TV - Angels in America was a 2003 HBO miniseries adapted from the Pulitzer Prize winning play of the same name by Tony Kushner. Kushner adapted his original text for the screen, and Mike Nichols directed. Set in 1985, the film has at its core the story of two couples whose relationships dissolve amidst the backdrop of Reagan era politics, the spreading AIDS epidemic and a rapidly changing social and political climate.
HBO broadcast the film in various formats: two three-hour chunks that correspond to "Millennium Approaches" and "Perestroika," as well as six one-hour "chapters" that roughly correspond to an act or two of each of these plays; the first three chapters ("Bad News", "In Vitro" and "The Messenger") were initially broadcast on December 7, 2003 to international acclaim, with the final three chapters ("Stop Moving!", "Beyond Nelly" and "Heaven, I'm in Heaven") following.
Angels in America was the most watched made-for-cable movie in 2003, garnering much critical acclaim and multiple Golden Globe and Emmy awards, among other numerous accolades. In 2006, Seattle Times listed the series amongst "Best of the filmed AIDS portrayals" on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of AIDS.
Kushner's style
Kushner's plays and screenplays are often a departure from typical Realism, experimenting with conventional storytelling by using shorter episodes. For example, the Angels in America plays together contain almost 50 scenes. His condensed, heightened dialogue compacts the action into impacting, concise bursts. He still proves effective in a more traditional, "long form" structure; three of the acts in Perestroika are long, single scenes. He is not afraid of spectacle - extraordinary moments that stay on target, not simply for show. Again in Angels, we witness a midnight appearance from an angel, and a frightening daytime appearance of a Biblical harbinger of revelation.
The play A Bright Room Called Day, and The Illusion, his 1990 adaptation of Pierre Corneille's L'illusion comique, are primarily in verse, showing an almost Shakespearean love of poetry. Still, his subjects remain current, and, like Henrik Ibsen, he creates stories that give rise to social discussion, instead of being simply "issue plays."
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