Who

Possibly the most celebrated playwright of his generation, Tony Kushner is most famous for his epic work about the AIDS crisis, Angels in America.

Backstory

Although he's the son of two New Yorkers, Kushner grew up in the south. (He describes himself as a "gay, Jewish socialist from Louisiana.") He started his theater career shortly after graduating from Columbia, penning his first play, The Age of Assassins, in 1982. He went on to write for a children's repertory company in St. Louis and wrote a number of plays that went largely unnoticed, before hitting the creative jackpot in the early '90s with the two-part, seven-hour Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Directed by George C. Wolfe, the Broadway play made Kushner an instant star, winning a Pulitzer, a Tony, and a Drama Desk award, among many other distinctions. Perhaps the most acclaimed American drama of the late 20th century, it was even included by Harold Bloom as the final listing in his 1995 book The Western Canon.

Kushner has since expanded into a number of other genres, dipping a toe into the musical theater world with 2002's Caroline, or Change, and collaborating with children's book author/illustrator Maurice Sendak on the 2005 Czech opera Brundibar. (Kushner wrote the script while Sendak designed the sets.) Kushner's also continued to write his signature politically-charged dramas, such as the 2001 Afghanistan-themed Homebody/Kabul, which premiered shortly after Sept. 11th.

Of note

While Kushner was the toast of the theater world throughout the 1990s, he's become familiar to a much wider audience in recent years. In 2003, Mike Nichols directed an adaptation of Angels for HBO starring Al Pacino and Meryl Streep, which received only slightly less glowing reviews than the original play. In 2005, Kushner moved into film when he co-wrote the script for the Steven Spielberg-directed Munich. He's now writing the screenplay for another movie to be directed by Spielberg, Lincoln, an adaptation of Doris Kearns Goodwin's biography of the 16th president. (Just how Kushner plans to address the persistent rumors that Lincoln was gay will be interesting to see.) Kushner has also turned his attention to activism: He frequently gives pithy speeches at colleges across the country, in which he can be counted on to criticize the Bush administration and Israel, which has made him a bête noir among conservatives and right-wing Jews. He got into further hot water for his play Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy, which features Laura Bush reading to a group of dead Iraqi children. One especially incendiary performance starred Hedwig mastermind John Cameron Mitchell as the First Lady.

On screen

The surprisingly shy Kushner is the subject of Freida Lee Mock's 2006 documentary Wrestling with Angels.

Personal

Kushner wed his longtime partner, Entertainment Weekly editor Mark Harris in a Jewish commitment ceremony in 2003. (Theirs was the first same-sex "Vows" item to run in the New York Times wedding announcement section.) The couple met at a party and got to know each other by chatting online. "His grammar was perfect," Kushner commented. "That was a turn-on." The couple lives in a book-filled apartment on West 107th Street.