There’s a mini-interview with Tony Kushner in the NY Times. Some quotes:

So perhaps the role of the artist, or one role at any rate, is to mix up and confuse all such antinomies. The role of the artist at all times and in all conditions is to make art. The role of the citizen, artist and otherwise, is to be engaged in political process.

… watching theater teaches people a way of looking at the world with a doubleness of vision that’s immensely useful — transformative, even. The audience in the theater has to wrestle with the dialectical nature of illusion and reality, all plays, all staged events, demand of their audiences an ability to believe and disbelieve at the same time, to watch with sophistication and a tolerance, even an appetite, for paradox… Theater, which traffics in compelling but not entirely convincing illusion, which can’t avoid demonstrating the human activity behind the illusion, is a great model for critical consciousness, for looking at the world both with passion and with cool skeptical analysis.

So this “preaching to the converted” question doesn’t address all religious practice, or all theater — just crummy religion and inept theater… The evangelizing playwright usually makes dreary plays, cautious plays which try to woo and seduce hostile, recalcitrant people, people less enlightened than the playwright — plays of condescension, in other words, plays which arrange their glib, necessarily simplified certainties in neat rows and send them forth, marching into battle… And while art educates, it’s never sufficient as a means of instruction; at some point a more reliable narrative must be sought. Art should strive for a level of complexity and depth that mirrors the complexity and depth of life, and for that matter that mirrors the complexity and depth of politics.

I like to imagine a room of people, about 200-800, depending on the play, and only those people, when I’m writing. I know how to talk to at least 800 people all at once. A million people is too many.

It’s always a good thing if you can put writing aside for a few weeks and go back to it cold… when working on a new play it’s very helpful in the rewriting process to be involved in the director-actor conversation, or at least I find it to be helpful. You learn to listen to scenes, when they work — engage, move, excite, entertain — and when they don’t… Audiences will tell you a lot about when you’re boring and when you’re confusing and when you’ve done well. This is tricky, because you can decide to hang on to a line, a moment, a character that an audience loves, even though hanging on prevents you from reshaping something larger that needs, in its entirety, to be reshaped.

I am not, however, a believer in advanced degrees in playwriting — I think post-graduate training for stage actors is necessary, but not for playwrights, who can and maybe should learn their craft by reading every play ever written, seeing lots of shows, and by being involved in theater production, in the rehearsal room, as an actor, stage manager, stage hand or assistant to a director; and of course playwrights learn by writing a lot, and finding actors to read their work out loud. I am adamantly opposed to undergraduates majoring in playwriting, acting, design or directing, or in any of the arts except perhaps dance and instrumental music (both of which require early rigorous training). Bachelor degrees should be acquired in the liberal arts and sciences, not in vocational training.

I think it’s salutary to ask yourself, over and over, if what you believe is true or just expedient, true or just comfortable or worse, just profitable?… My job as a playwright is, in part, to try to understand others as they see themselves. That job is the same whether I’m writing a character I agree or disagree with politically. I love writing characters whose political lives offend me, upset me — it’s a challenge to figure such people out… People rarely believe nonsense; maybe only psychotic people believe in nonsensical things. Even in a profoundly errant ideology there are truths, or at least perspectives, worth examining. If my political opinions are sound, they will survive encounters with such characters, and even be strengthened by them.

Satisfying an audience is always important. Not all audiences are for all plays, and the relationship between size of satisfied audience and quality of a given play is not proportional. Sometimes things that fly actually make money. Sometimes flying things make no money at all. And sometimes, very often, the big moneymakers have means other than wings for locomotion — legs, sometimes many, many legs, and sometimes slithering is involved. Some of the biggest money makers are entirely inert.

What impresses me about Tony Kushner’s writing is its economy and passion within that economy. His material is always political, but often in a way that Naomi Wallace’s is political, and does not fall into the category of agitprop. His comments above on writing actually made me feel better about myself as a writer — I decided a while ago that what I wanted to do was write about how I wanted to change the world, and he points out that that is too tall of an order. What I need to learn is to make more nuanced arguments, and to pick apart the contradictions. There’s a really beautiful part that I didn’t excerpt about how lockstep congregations represent dead theologies and the purpose of preachers.

I think his most contentious statement is about how undergraduate education is for liberal arts and sciences, not “vocational training.” Kushner here reveals himself to be a sort of neo-Classicist in some ways. This is also the approach that Phi Beta Kappa takes; they recently sent me a letter bemoaning the increasing specialization of undergraduate eduation. While I’m very tempted to agree with him on this point because of his forceful writing, the truth is I hadn’t given it very much thought. I think that being able to think critically, being able to teach yourself new things, and being familiar with a wide range of ideas is important, but is a liberal arts education the only way to achieve that?

I have to agree with his point about reading all plays ever written. I just don’t understand people who are interested in the theater who don’t read plays. Some give a bullshit excuse about how plays are meant to be seen and not read, but the illusion of the stage is what you make of it, and reading gives you all the possibilities of your imagination. In Naomi Wallace’s Slaughter City, one of the main characters joints a steer while talking to it as if it is the woman he loves. In Angels In America the Angel crashes through the ceiling of Prior’s room. These are intensely theatrical moments, and reading them gives you a sense of how you can write freely and leave the actualization to someone else. If you restrict your ideas of what can be done in the theater to the theater you have seen, you’ll limit your vocabulary of the theatrical to Deadly stage effects, because that is all to often what is seen.

And of course, respect the opinions of those you disagree with. I need to work on this — finding the kernel of truth in the opposition.