Tony Kushner 'Trump has a sinkhole instead of a soul'
He has spent his life dramatising America’s angels and demons. As his civil rights musical returns to Britain, the playwright reveals all about revamping West Side Story for Spielberg – and writing a play about Trump
I hate watching my plays,” Tony Kushner says. “They’re all so long and they take for ever and the only one that’s not true of is Caroline. It’s two hours with intermission and I could listen to that music for ever.”
Caroline is Caroline, Or Change, Kushner’s only musical. Written with the composer Jeanine Tesori (who wrote the music for Fun Home) in 2003, it won an Olivier award in 2007 and it’s now enjoying a run in London’s West End. Caroline, the African-American maid at its centre, spends most of her days in a basement, vibrating to the rhythms of the radio, the washing machine, and her own sorrowing heart. Kushner works from a basement, too, in a room beneath an apartment building in Manhattan’s East Village.
Heaving bookshelves are the defining feature of Kushner’s basement. They cling to every available wall and scrape the high ceilings. There are books on theatre, religion, psychoanalysis and many of the spines are dotted with colour-coded stickers, remnants of an organisational project that manifestly failed. Kushner sits beneath those spines, two days after Thanksgiving. He and his husband, the writer Mark Harris, prepared a holiday dinner – turkey, a salad, plus two kinds of stuffing, two kinds of pie, two kinds of ice cream, because even his meals are dialectical – for 12 friends, “cooking and cleaning into a complete state of exhaustion”, he says.Facebook Twitter
Kushner is still recovering. A fuchsia scarf hugs his neck; his voice rasps. He talks anyway. No surprise. Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of New York’s Public Theater and a longtime collaborator, has described him as one of the great talkers of the western world. Wry, philosophical, plain mesmerising, Kushner, it seems, can talk his way through anything. Caroline is a favourite subject. And his favourite show. Take that, Angels in America.
Caroline tells such an uncomplicated story, it’s almost a parable. In 1963, in Louisiana, in an assimilated Jewish household much like the one Kushner grew up in, Caroline labours for $30 per week. The family’s young son, Noah, carelessly leaves loose change in his pockets. To teach him a lesson, Noah’s stepmother tells Caroline that she can keep what money she finds.
Simple enough. But there’s great complexity in Tesori’s deployment of popular and classical musical forms and the way in which Kushner allows larger social concerns to penetrate acutely personal struggles. When director Michael Longhurst’s revival, which stars Sharon D Clarke, premiered last year at the Chichester Festival theatre, the Observer’s Susannah Clapp called it “one of the most gloriously disruptive, completely distinctive musicals of the past 20 years”.
Kushner talked with Longhurst about American Jewry and 1960s Louisiana, shared some old photos, sat in on a run-through. He and Tesori saw the full production in Chichester last year and he gave Longhurst only one note, unprecedented for Kushner, who is an inveterate note-giver. The note was about a wig.