Tiny Kushner

by Tony Kushner

"As a title, TINY KUSHNER sounds like a joke, and it is, of sorts, a self-deprecating acknowledgment by the playwright Tony Kushner that he generally writes long. His most famous work, ANGELS IN AMERICA, began as a commission for a 90-minute play with three characters and ended up as a two-part extravaganza clocking in at more than seven hours ... The new work consists of five one-act playlets that feature both fictional characters and those borrowed from real life - including Dr Arnold Hutschnecker, who was Richard M Nixon's psychiatrist. Two plays have therapy sessions in them, actually. Three have dead people as characters. One takes place on the moon. All five, however, resonate on the subject of America and the moral complexities created for its citizens by its various advantages in the world, a theme that reaches a climax in ONLY WE WHO GUARD THE MYSTERY SHALL BE UNHAPPY. Set just before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and written out of fury at the Bush administration's rush to war, it posits Laura Bush reading to a class of dead Iraqi children. Essentially a monologue (it was published by The Nation), it portrays a first lady wrestling with her conscience and betraying the agony of perpetual self-justification ... Individually and even collectively, the five entries here are snacks in the Kushner canon. However, that doesn't make them nonnourishing or the evening unsatisfying; Mr Kushner's fierce liberal conscience (he's Arthur Miller's heir, in that regard), colossally fanciful imagination and virtuosic gift for composing verbal arias are too much in evidence for that." -Bruce Weber, The New York Times

Genres: Plays

86 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Tony Kushner is an award-winning American playwright most famous for his play Angels in America, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He is also co-author, along with Eric Roth, of the screenplay of the 2005 film Munich, which was directed by Steven Spielberg and earned Kushner (along with Roth) an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Reviews

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Five short plays by Tony Kushner, but because they are Kushner, they don’t feel short. Includes plays about a tax revolt by New York City cops, Nixon’s analyst in heaven, the last queen of Albania on the moon and Laura Bush reading The Brothers Karamazov to dead Iraqi children. Bought at Strand Bookstore, online.

[Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked 3/5 of these plays but the ones I liked— “Flip Flop Fly”, “Terminating”, and “Only We Who Guard The Mystery Shall Be Unhappy” — were typical amazing kushner boiled down. I wish he would expand and make these three full plays!

[Kat Hawthorne · Rating 5 out of 5]

absolutely brilliant

[Leigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three of these one-acts were new to me, but in the end it was the two more familiar ones--Terminating or Sonnet LXXV or "Lass Meine Schmerzen Nicht Verloren Sein" or Ambivalence and particularly East Coast Ode to Howard Jarvis: A Little Teleplay in Tiny Monologues--that I loved best.

(East Coast Ode was previously published in Death and Taxes: Hydrotaphia and Other Plays, and Terminating in both Death and Taxes and the anthology Love's Fire: Seven New Plays Inspired by Seven Shakespearean Sonnets.)

[Chas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd read a few of these in the Hydriotaphia collection, and they're just as good here. There are more ideas in these five little plays than most playwrights have in their entire careers.