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Default | NEWS
10/16/2009 Part wiseguy, all wise
BY MIKE WILLIAMS |
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| JEFF FITLOW |
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| Pulitzer Prizing-winning writer Tony Kushner, left, discussed change, dreams, rights, the musicality of language and “Thelma and Louise,” among other things during the Oct. 14 President's Lecture. With Rice President David Leebron enjoying his role as questioner from an adjacent chair, Kushner barely paused for breath once he took on a topic. |
An opening reading of his post-9/11 “A Prayer for New York” -- a short play for two characters, a lawyer and his elderly Jewish mother -- touched all the bases for which his work is notable: It cut a high-minded topic down to human scale with humor, understanding and a lived-in, knowing sense of dialogue.
During the talk that followed, Kushner kept a nearly full house enthralled by the rush of ideas that flooded from the stage:
On change: "Mostly people who decide it's their job to go out and change people are unpleasant people who wind up in trouble and ought to be in prison. And sometimes they are, and sometimes they aren't. …
"Change and life are inseparable processes, and we live in a world where we are constantly confronted with ideologies that posit change is a bad thing … that change is absolutely terrifying. I absolutely believe that one essential, single, inarguable defining characteristic of life is transformation, is change. Stability is death."
On handling change: "People are not instructed to handle change gracefully. … We're actually deformed by the process.
"I'm intrigued by people who find themselves in the middle of enormous social upheaval. In my 53 years, upheaval has been constant. I can't think of a single year that I've been alive … that something terrifying hasn't been happening somewhere, and frequently fairly nearby -- sometimes, actually, in my room."
On “Hamlet”: "You may see 18 different versions of it, but whatever that thing is, that large field of uncertainty called 'Hamlet,' it's the greatest thing that anybody ever wrote. And it's not even a good story -- the main character is an a--hole! … The greatest (play), without question, is the messiest, most uncontainable one."
On troublesome plays: "I'm in the middle of a new play now, and it's an enormous, messy, sprawling thing. It's scaring me to death, and I have a suspicion it's going to be one of those. But you don't give up on them until they snatch it out of your hands and put it on the stage. You keep working on it, and then you expire, but you'll leave behind many versions of it."
On music: "When you read Keats or Shakespeare … you see there are places where the great poets make language say things that language can't actually say. But music does that just by being music. It has an access to parts of us that we really keep closed up."
On being agnostic: "I believe, like all agnostics, it's my job to be extremely anxious and tense all the time. People ask what are you going to do when you die and go to heaven and God says, 'Why didn't you believe in me?' And I'm going to say, 'Well, sir, why didn't you give me more proof?'"
On theater's influence: "There was an Onion headline that said, 'Woman who says book changed her life hasn't actually changed at all.' When people come up to me and say, 'Your play changed my life,' I feel touched by that and moved by that, but of course, it's never true. They were looking for something, a catalyst, and maybe they found it in the play. If the play's useful to somebody, in that regard, that's great.
"We have to remember working in the theater that what we're doing, on some level, is profoundly silly."
On stage versus screen: "More people saw the first hour of 'Angels' on the first night it was on HBO than had ever seen the play anywhere in the United States in the theater -- and it had been playing for a long time. It was exciting to start a national conversation that way. On the other hand, it's a different art form."
On critics: "I just saw 'Tosca' at the Met in a controversial production -- controversial because most critics in New York are raving morons. … I loved it."
On dreams: "You don't have the ability to alter your audience. You have the ability to show the audience certain things. They're going to watch it in the way that a sleeper in the dark is aware of a dream. … It's going to show you all the things, in very instructive, poetic versions, all the things you're terrified to look at in daily life. Then you can choose to do something about it, if it's trying to tell you something, which it frequently is.
"The most terrifying sentence in the English language is, 'I had a really interesting dream last night …'"
On President Barack Obama: "I think it's extraordinary that when he makes speeches about the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community, he always makes the effort to connect our struggles to … the African-American civil rights movement. I think that's great. On the matter of 'don't ask, don't tell,' I believe it's going to go away, but I'm more than willing to be patient right now."
On federal funding of the arts: "If you want to have a civilization, you have to have the arts."
On “Thelma and Louise”: Of course, when they go over the cliff, they're going to die, obviously. But the film doesn't show it. It stops in midair. It's a work of art, not a documentary. It's both … great tragedy and a moment of emancipation.
"That's one of the gifts that we receive in the theater or art is the place that goes beyond what's rationally explicable."
On the soul: "The soul -- if there is such a thing -- the eternal mechanism of human beings, is essentially a progressive mechanism. It's always moving toward a more perfect completeness."
The President's Lecture Series is supported by the J. Newton Rayzor Lecture Fund. Author Douglas Hofstadter will deliver the next President's Lecture on "Analogy as the Core of Cognition" at Rice Memorial Center's Grand Hall Nov. 17.
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