Tony Kushner

Do you consider yourself a specifically New York artist?
Tony Kushner: I’m an enthusiast for identity politics. I’m a gay artist, a Jewish artist, an American artist. But New York is my home; my best known play is set in New York. In many ways, [Angels in America] is a play about this city. I’m a little divided because I’m from the Deep South. My mother is a New Yorker—I was born here and moved to Louisiana when I was two-and-a-half. But the New York thing was implanted at birth by my mother. We were preprogrammed to get out of Lake Charles.

What was your first show here?
Tony Kushner: At the very first little theater company I formed in grad school at NYU. We did The Age of Assassins. I remember they were filming Tootsie across the street, and we all freaked out when Dustin Hoffman came over and looked at our poster. When I left school I worked at the UN Plaza Hotel as a switchboard operator, where I wrote and tried to put up work at a little place called Theatre 22. There was an S&M bordello right above the theater, so we could hear high-heeled boots and screaming above our heads while we rehearsed.

How has New York changed since you’ve been here?
Tony Kushner: When I first arrived in 1974, with no money and living on scholarship, I saw Broadway, the Ring cycle at the Met, all incredibly cheap. The little theater spaces all over Chelsea and Soho—it wasn’t even called Chelsea then—almost all of them are gone now. The Village Voice had an amazing collection of critics, and sometimes they would send two or three people to cover the same piece. Then they got rid of everyone—everyone but Michael Feingold. Everyone but the one they should have gotten rid of! And you can print that.

I’m worried…since the Koch years New York has been so overdeveloped.
Tony Kushner: It doesn’t look as good as it used to. It used to look like a jumble of skyscrapers, but there was a spaciousness to it. Now the island is being strangulated by building, much of it indistinguishable. At the risk of offending Sarah Palin, I feel there is a lack of community-organizing working in tandem with city government. People think is great just because he’s not a hateful rabble-rouser. But we need progressive thinking about how to make New York into a livable place. There’s still a lot of work to be done.

Is there a silver lining?
Tony Kushner: I don’t want to be one of those awful 52-year-old people who says, “Oh, it’s all shit now.” New York is constantly renewing itself—in what we condescendingly call the outer boroughs, you see little theater companies and restaurants that remind me of what the Village used to be like. And all the changes aren’t bad…I have an office on Union Square that I’ve been in for years. Union Square used to be a police holding-pen. It was surrounded with a fence and they would grab a criminal and throw him in there overnight. Now it’s a lovely park.

What is your favorite place in New York?
Tony Kushner: The New York Society Library at 79th and Madison. It’s a very snooty, amazing old mansion with rooms where people can go and write. You pay to belong, but it’s not very much. My favorite place to write, though, is the Rose Reading Room at the New York Public Library. I love the room, I love the library, I love the display of people. It has that multiethnic mix that makes riding the subway so exciting. I genuinely love the subway too. I even write on it when the trip is long enough. My earliest memory is of being taken on the subway as a baby.

Many of my favorite places are now gone—the bookstores. There used to be so many! I still can’t believe that Gotham Book Mart isn’t on 47th Street any more. I thought it was going to be there forever.

So, apart from more bookstores, what will the New York of the future need to look like?
Tony Kushner: One thing: I’ve become a big bike rider. I love the bike trails; I want to see it as a city of bike traffic. Yes, we need affordable housing so the city doesn’t become block after block of wealthy people, because you only have a stable city when you have a diversity of incomes. But really? We need more bike lanes.

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