Pulitzer Prize Winning Playwright Tony Kushner Attacks The Myth Of The Lone Genius

Tony Kushner is one of America’s most celebrated writers. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his 1993 play ANGELS IN AMERICA, and was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay for LINCOLN. He was worked on numerous other stage, film and television projects of note.In an essay he wrote to accompany the published version of his epic play ANGELS IN AMERICA, Parts 1 and 2, Tony Kushner took time to reflect on the many people with whom he had informally collaborated on the project.“The fiction that artistic labor happens in isolation, and that artistic accomplishment is exclusively the provenance of individual talents, is politically charged, and, in my case at least, repudiated by the facts. . . . Americans pay high prices for maintaining the Myth of the Individual; we have no system of universal health care, we don’t educate our children, we can’t pass sane gun control laws, we hate and fear inevitable processes like aging and death. Way down, close to the bottom of the list of the evils individualism visits on our culture is the fact that in the modern era it isn’t enough to write; you must also be a Writer and play your part as the protagonist in a cautionary narrative in which you will fail or triumph, be in or out, hot or cold. The rewards can be fantastic; the punishment dismal; it’s a zero-sum game, and its guarantor of value, its marker, is that you pretend to play it solo, preserving the myth that you alone are the wellspring of your creativity.”Kushner then acknowledged some of the people who contributed to the writing of ANGELS IN AMERICA, including: Oskar Eustis, “the man who commissioned the play, helped to shape it and co-directed the Los Angeles Production;” and Kushner’s good friend Kimberly T. Flynn, to whom part 2 of the play is dedicated. Kushner even acknowledges that he considers some writers whom he has never met as collaborators.Kushner also pointed out that he was not the first playwright to acknowledge collaborators on what most people would consider a solitary work. Bertold Brecht was deeply committed to collectivity as an achievable political goal, and frequently acknowledged informal collaborators on the title page of many of his plays.In an interesting note, Kushner recognizes that the “myth” is so central to our understanding of the creative process that we don’t even have words to describe informal collaborators. Calling someone a collaborator implies co-authorship, and that is not the relationship to which Kushner refers. And, according to Kushner, no one really knows what a dramaturg is. We are left incapable of describing those people who inspire and shape the creative processes of others.So, according to Tony Kusher, no one really writes alone; and few talk about this fact.