Tony Kushner
An Evening with Tony Kushner | Thursday, April 5, 2018 at 7:30PM
Join us for an engaging on-stage discussion with Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright and author of Angels in America and Caroline, or Change, and screenwriter of movies Munich and Lincoln.
Kushner gives voice to characters who have been rendered powerless by the forces of circumstance — a drag queen dying of AIDS, an uneducated Southern maid, contemporary Afghans — and his attempt to see all sides of their predicament has a sly subversiveness. He forces the audience to identify with the marginalized — a humanizing act of the imagination. 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."
Kushner will be interviewed on stage by Beth Huber, Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Critical Studies (a program in the WCU English Department.) This event is a joint presentation by Bardo Arts Center, WCU Literary Festival, and is one of the featured events in the WCU College of Fine and Performing Arts 10th Anniversary, “Celebrating 10 Years of Inspiring Art.”
For more Tony Kushner videos, information, and his written works, please visit his website.
Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an Emmy Award, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, an Arts Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a PEN/Laura Pels Award, a Spirit of Justice Award from the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, a Cultural Achievement Award from The National Foundation for Jewish Culture, a Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for lifetime achievement, the 2012 National Medal of Arts, and the 2015 Lifetime Achievement in the American Theater Award, among many others.
Huber spent thirteen years writing and acting for theater companies in Kansas City and throughout Europe for the USO before returning to the University of Missouri to obtain a bachelor’s degree in creative writing, a master’s in writing and rhetoric, and a doctorate in rhetoric and history.
This evening also serves as the final event of the Spring Literary Festival by the WCU English Department, running April 2-5. The mission of the festival is to foster reading, cultivate the arts, and enrich our community through the best humanities education possible.
