Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2009 at 8 p.m.
Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2009 at 8 p.m.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010 at 8 p.m.Tony Kushner
Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2009
Dominique de Menil Memorial Lecture
Location: Stude Concert Hall, Alice Pratt Brown Hall (building 13 on the campus map) • Time: 8 p.m.
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner takes an intractable glee in tackling the most difficult subjects in contemporary history — among them AIDS, the conservative counterrevolution, Afghanistan, German fascism, and racism and the civil rights movement in the South. But his plays, which often experiment with conventional storytelling by using shorter episodes, are rarely polemical.
Instead Kushner rejects ideology in favor of what he calls “a dialectically shaped truth,” which must be “outrageously funny” and “absolutely agonizing” and must “move us forward.” In the process, he gives voice to characters who have been rendered powerless by the forces of circumstances. His attempts to see all sides of their predicaments contain a sly subversiveness that forces the audience to identify with the marginalized in a humanizing act of the imagination.
The recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an Emmy Award, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, an Oscar nomination and numerous other awards and honors, Kushner is best known for his two-part epic, “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.” He also wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols’ film of “Angels in America” and Steven Spielberg’s “Munich.” Currently, he is working on the screenplay for an upcoming Spielberg film on Abraham Lincoln.
